Defining Moment #2

Harmony Hut

When my best friend won 92 albums from WLPL (92 FM, of course), I was the lucky bum who got to tag along. We were already cutting edge 9th graders. We read Creem and Rock Scene and Circus. We read Hit Parade and so knew the lyrics to all the Aerosmith songs.

But this changed our lives, my life. We bought the albums we could never hear on the radio by bands whose pictures made us wild: The Sex Pistols, the Ramones, The Runaways, The Damned, The Dead Boys, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Television, The Stranglers.

My friend was an Elton John fan, but, convinced she looked just like Joan Jett of the Runaways, she became enamored with them. We used to sing their songs together, as if we were performing them; she took Cherie’s part, as she had a deeper, thicker voice then. I could imitate Joan much more easily. We saw them in concert and got backstage passes because of her look-alike.

We went to a lot of concerts together, but my girlfriend turned out to be something of a groupie, leaving me alone on the bench backstage while she performed promises to pay off our debts of gratitude to roadies for letting big stars like Leslie West sweat on us and bigger stars like Ted Nugent step on our feet on the way out to the stage. We hung around forbidden areas. That’s how we met Cheap Trick (I still have the autographs from that day). It’s how we met the Ramones, even though we missed the show because we were thrown out for hanging around forbidden areas.

My best friend eventually dumped me and punk rock. But that moment in Harmony Hut started a lifelong love of alternative music. It led me not to groupie-dom, though I did manage to meet huge stars like U-2, the Psychedelic Furs, and Iggy Pop just for being in the right place at the right time (or the wrong time, as in the case of Iggy, who, on two separate occasions, invited me to snort coke and fuck. Not being a fan of little men or runny noses, I declined).

When I started college at Towson, I had already been into punk rock for so many years that I knew I would finally meet people like me. My first semester, I remember hearing stray shouts of, “Whip it, Whip it good!” from cocky jocks. But at last I met some weirdoes outside the office of the Alternative Action Committee, a group run by hippie philosophy majors. (Go figure. In high school, the only friends I had were Dead heads; here, too, the hippies and punks congregated, closer than either group cared to admit.) One of these folks was a guy from THEE punk rock band, Thee Katatonix. He’s been one of my best friends for more than twenty years.

After my first year, I put an ad in the paper looking to front a group. I auditioned for two—Nouveau Blind and Question 47--and landed the second. We were a band for more than a year, playing at The Marble Bar, Oddfellows Hall, Maxwells, Girards, and, early on, the Wax Museum, where we opened for the Thompson Twins. Our songs were played on Rod Misey’s show at WCVT, Towson State’s station. Every time they played us, callers would wonder if it was the new Berlin album.

That this is my most defining moment nags at me. This, more than grief, more than childbirth? Without it, there may still have been children, dogs, and a husband or two. But this moment, this above all other moments, sent me here, to these dogs, to this child, to this husband. This moment gave me my first love and all the loves that followed.