The year was 1978 and I was a half baked teenage girl. Half baked because I was a couple of years away from total freedom but still wearing the yoke of childhood. Listening to Muskrat Love kind of music - Muskrat Susie, Muskrat Sam, do the jitterbug in Muskrat land. Trying to find my place in the social hierarchy and not happy with life in general. One day while listening to the radio in the car I heard the sound of music that sent a jolt down my spine and whispered in my ear, look beyond this small little world and see what the future holds. This was the album that changed an unhappy, juvenile teenage girl into a young woman with a little bit of attitude. Van Halen.
Metal is not everyone's idea of music. I get that. But I can't help but want to wax poetic about this album. The songs, the album cover, the vocal machinations of David Lee Roth and the genius that is Eddie Van Halen. I'm not a music critic, just another fan who felt the scales fall from her eyes when she started listening to You Really Got Me and Eruption.
I had a crush on a young man who didn't know that I existed until one day when he saw that I had drawn the Van Halen logo on a book cover. From that point on he made a point to discuss Eddie Van Halen with me during breaks in class and I was a very happy girl. I was never the granola girl type and certainly not a disco queen, but I could be a smart girl who liked metal and that's when I shook off those half baked notions of what I should be and traded them in for what I could be. You really got me now.
This is my first album. It's still in my possession, can you believe it?
Early childhood was tumultuous. Parents having marital difficulties and a parent with emotional maturity issues. I only mention this because I am fairly certain it's why I escaped into reading and music. I'm a Believer was a song that made me happy. To this day I can sing all of the lyrics and I'm pretty certain I can do a mean tambourine accompaniment if I channel my inner Davy Jones. The TV show was ridiculous. Even as a child, I thought it was silly, but I loved and still love the music. Thank you Davy, Peter, Micky, and Michael for being so cute and making music that made a little girl dance and sing.
In early 1988 I was still listening to 80's hair bands. I was fairly new to Dallas and finding my way in the city and without much thought listened to the same kind of radio stations I had listened to in Oklahoma City. Purely by chance I tuned into 94.5 The Edge in Dallas Fort Worth. Obviously I was a little late to the party when it came to discovering alternative music, but boy howdy, did I embrace the change. Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians were not the first alternative rock band that I loved, but when I look back at those early days in Dallas, the song What I Am, starts playing in my head. The New Bohemians were a local Dallas band. I never saw them play live (drat), but this CD was in heavy rotation in my home stereo and car. Alternative music was the soundtrack to some really great, fun years as a single working woman in Dallas and the New Bohemians and Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars were an integral part of that life.
