I tried Led Zeppelin II. Oh, my. Heartbreaker. Ramble On. Living Loving Maid.
I sat in that room for hours, pulling albums off of the shelf, sampling them and putting them back, committing the names and lyrics to memory.
Black Sabbath. The Who. Alice Cooper. T Rex. David Bowie. MC5. I was in a frenzy, sampling everything that looked like it wasn't your typical AM radio fodder. Iggy Pop. The Doors. Velvet Underground.
I stopped reading teen crush magazines that summer and started reading Creem. I spent hours examining every word, every story, every feature article. When I was done with the magazine, I would cut out the pictures and hang them on the bulletin board in my room. I wrote letters to the editor, usually berating them for one thing or another. Creem pissed me off but, for a while, it was the only rock and roll magazine that mattered.
I spent most of that summer in my room with stealthily borrowed albums. Sometimes, the music would shake the walls. Sometimes, it would shake my very soul. Always, I would be creating my own American dream of becoming a rock star or at least a rock critic.
Through the years my tastes changed. Bands came and went. I did the whole punk thing, and the underground thing and the heavy metal thing. While the genres have changed, the rock and roll underlying it all has stayed constant.
Still, on hot, humid summer days when I escape to the dark of my air-conditioned bedroom to beat the heat, I can close my eyes and be back there. The scratch of the vinyl. The feel of the needle under your finger as you gently wipe dust from it. I think about that summer and how rock and roll changed my life. It took me down a different path, a different excursion than I thought I would travel. I never did become that rock critic (although I did a stint once for a local music paper, but they fired me after my first review was a scathing indictment of Mark McGrath), although I do spend a lot of time criticizing the current state of rock.
1973, my summer of rock and roll, the summer that shaped the rest of my days.
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