You Really Got Me

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.