January 21: 80s music
On March 20, 1990, I went to the Aerosmith concert at the Olympic
Saddledome in Calgary. My guest was Nikki J, who was a fellow Grade 10
student at Bishop Grandin. I was a huge Aerosmith fan. Nikki wasn't, but
she went with me anyway.
My middle name just happens to be Tyler and that may be one of the happiest coincidences of my teenaged life. How many girlies did I impress by flashing my driver's license, using my thumb to cover up my real last name. "Are you related?" they would ask. "No," I'd say, figuring a lie would get me in more trouble than the truth.
The tour was to promote Aerosmith's album Pump, which it released last year. My best friend, Jason, who was an amazing guitarist, told me that Aerosmith's songs were all about having sex. I disagreed. So we listened to Pump and analyzed each song.
Young Lust - sex
FINE - sex
Love in an elevator - sex
Monkey on my back - overcoming drug abuse
Janie's got a gun - a girl shoots her father for being an abusive prick
The other side - sex
My girl - sex
Don't get mad, get even - about living on the streets
Voodoo medicine man - the world is messed up and we need a medicine man to fix it
What it takes - trying to let someone you love go
So actually, Pump is only half filthy. The other half is a mix of social commentary and the blues. I still don't think St. Augustine would go to an Aerosmith concert if I invited him though. Nikki went even though she told me Aerosmith was not her favourite band. She told me that for Christmas in Grade 3, her dad got her a copy of the KISS album Lick it Up.
-
The 80s gave us the best music of the 20th century. It gave us Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince - who I will restrain myself from talking about in this note.
The 80s also gave us lots of hair metal bands like Poison and Motley Crue.
Jason, Larry and I used to have a clubhouse (actually Larry's mom's garage) and inside it we had a poster from Motley Crue's Theatre of Pain album, which was released in 1985. I never dug Motley Crue but I was afraid to tell my friends that. My friends were headbangers and they wanted me to grow my hair long so I could be a headbanger like them and Judas Priest and Vince Neil. I was going to ask them if they were going to wear makeup and lingere too but I let it go at that.
Having said that, there was a time in 1983 when I actually believed Motley Crue was a Christian band. They had released a song and an album called Shout at the Devil and I assumed that they were encouraging listeners to get angry with Satan and, consequently, turn to God. Of course I was wrong about this. Vince Neil later said that song was about shouting at authority like the police, your church or your parents. Of course my source for this is disgraced money-grubbing exorcist Bob Larson so I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
Anyway, one of my friends was such a diehard Crue fan that he probably would have licked Vince Neil's bumhole had the lipstick-wearing blondie asked. I once pointed out to him that Vince Neil had killed someone while driving drunk and the friend said that it wasn't true and that Vince had been set up.
In any case, Motley Crue probably released the most pretentious album of the 80s, 1987's Girls Girls Girls. I was in a record store with my grandfather once and he saw the album and he asked me if the people on the front were supposed to be girls. "They kind of look like men dressing up as girls," he said. I said that was most surely true and I wondered why so many women wanted to have sex with them. Probably because they had money.
-
And then there's Twisted Sister.
I remember when I was in Grade 6 I convinced my mom to let me host a backyard trampoline party for my class. We'd make hot dogs and jump on the trampoline. My mom said that we should go to the video store and rent some movies, just in case it rained. At the video store, I saw a collection of videos for Twisted Sister's album, Stay Hungry. The lady behind the counter said that was a no-no because there was footage of Dee Snider eating meat and mouthing swear words and wearing makeup and bleeding from his mouth. We rented Duran Duran videos instead. It did not rain. But later, Jason came over and said he wanted to watch the Duran Duran videos. There were two of them that had naked ladies - Girls on Film and The Chauffeur. Man, I wish it had rained that day. My mom would have totally let me rent anything from Twisted Sister after that.
Actually, Dee Snider was a pretty cool cat. He once wrote a survival guide for teenagers and he probably would have been a swell friend to have. He would not have enticed me to worship the devil and probably would have encouraged me to keep going to church and to say no to drugs and alcohol. When Dee Snider testified before the Parents Music Resource Council (or whatever it was), he even told Tipper Gore that he still adhered to Christian values.
And, as a matter of fact, the song Burn in Hell contains some pretty good theology.
You can't believe all the things i've done wrong in my life
Without even trying i've lived on the edge of a knife
Well, i've played with fire, but i don't want to get myself burned
To thine own self be true, so i think that it's time for a turn
Before i burn in hell
Oh, burn in hell
Take a good look in your heart, tell me what do you see?
It's black and it's dark, now is that how you want it to be?
It's up to you, what you do will decide your own fate
Make your choice now for tomorrow may be far too late
Okay... so it's not a hundred per cent accurate. Christians believe that our works don't save us - only faith in the risen Christ will do that. But hey - it's still better than "let's do coke and bang some groupies and then vandalize churches and then go to Dairy Queen."
-
I need to go back to Aerosmith because in Grade 8, I was part of a lip sync competition. We were doing Walk this Way, the Run DMC version. Later, I was told that Run DMC just covered the song and then I heard the original version on Aerosmith's greatest hits album. I thought it was the best rock song ever made. I still think that today.
I kind of became an Aerosmith fan then and Permanent Vacation was one of the first albums I bought with my own money.
Here is what I think the songs on Permanent Vacation are about:
Hearts done time - About running around with bad women
Magic touch - sex
Rag doll - sex
Simoriah - a hot girl named Simoriah
Dude looks like a lady - transvestites
St. John - about a messed up guy who watches TV a lot
Hangman jury - About a man who kiled someone
Girl Keeps Coming Apart - about a high maintenance girlfriend
Angel - About breaking up with someone and then realizing you love them
Permanent Vacation - About going away somewhere nice
I'm down - About the need to cover a Beatles song
The movie - About closing Permanent Vacation with an instrumental track
(Side note: I hope this blog comes up as number one whenever someone types Aerosmith into a search engine.)
-
And then there's David Lee Roth.
We used to rush home from school to catch Samantha Taylor host Video Hits at 4:30. She would show videos from Duran Duran, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Thompson Twins, Hall & Oates and Billy Ocean. But when she showed a David Lee Roth video, we all went nuts. David Lee Roth videos were the best videos ever.
David Lee Roth was crazy and his video for California Girls remains my favourite music video of all time. I was 12 and watching David swivel his hips alongside two dozen bikini-clad models (minus the bodybuilder one, who was scary - Gen X'ers know what I'm talking about) gave me great hope for my girl-chasing future.
-
Honourable mentions;
Weird Al Yankovic: Saw him in concert twice. He started in 1983 and is still going strong today. Weird Al may even outlive me.
Huey Lewis and the News: Just because it was the first concert I ever went to. Went with my mom. 1986.
Quiet Riot: They used to be my favourite band and I used to think The Wild and the Young was the best song ever. Once, an old girlfriend climbed into my car and found a Quiet Riot tape in the glovebox. She looked at me and just started laughing. She was still laughing half an hour later.
Cyndi Lauper: She bop. What's it about? You'll only really know after you lose your innocence.
And I don't think I need to devote any more space talking about Prince.
My middle name just happens to be Tyler and that may be one of the happiest coincidences of my teenaged life. How many girlies did I impress by flashing my driver's license, using my thumb to cover up my real last name. "Are you related?" they would ask. "No," I'd say, figuring a lie would get me in more trouble than the truth.
The tour was to promote Aerosmith's album Pump, which it released last year. My best friend, Jason, who was an amazing guitarist, told me that Aerosmith's songs were all about having sex. I disagreed. So we listened to Pump and analyzed each song.
Young Lust - sex
FINE - sex
Love in an elevator - sex
Monkey on my back - overcoming drug abuse
Janie's got a gun - a girl shoots her father for being an abusive prick
The other side - sex
My girl - sex
Don't get mad, get even - about living on the streets
Voodoo medicine man - the world is messed up and we need a medicine man to fix it
What it takes - trying to let someone you love go
So actually, Pump is only half filthy. The other half is a mix of social commentary and the blues. I still don't think St. Augustine would go to an Aerosmith concert if I invited him though. Nikki went even though she told me Aerosmith was not her favourite band. She told me that for Christmas in Grade 3, her dad got her a copy of the KISS album Lick it Up.
-
The 80s gave us the best music of the 20th century. It gave us Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince - who I will restrain myself from talking about in this note.
The 80s also gave us lots of hair metal bands like Poison and Motley Crue.
Jason, Larry and I used to have a clubhouse (actually Larry's mom's garage) and inside it we had a poster from Motley Crue's Theatre of Pain album, which was released in 1985. I never dug Motley Crue but I was afraid to tell my friends that. My friends were headbangers and they wanted me to grow my hair long so I could be a headbanger like them and Judas Priest and Vince Neil. I was going to ask them if they were going to wear makeup and lingere too but I let it go at that.
Having said that, there was a time in 1983 when I actually believed Motley Crue was a Christian band. They had released a song and an album called Shout at the Devil and I assumed that they were encouraging listeners to get angry with Satan and, consequently, turn to God. Of course I was wrong about this. Vince Neil later said that song was about shouting at authority like the police, your church or your parents. Of course my source for this is disgraced money-grubbing exorcist Bob Larson so I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
Anyway, one of my friends was such a diehard Crue fan that he probably would have licked Vince Neil's bumhole had the lipstick-wearing blondie asked. I once pointed out to him that Vince Neil had killed someone while driving drunk and the friend said that it wasn't true and that Vince had been set up.
In any case, Motley Crue probably released the most pretentious album of the 80s, 1987's Girls Girls Girls. I was in a record store with my grandfather once and he saw the album and he asked me if the people on the front were supposed to be girls. "They kind of look like men dressing up as girls," he said. I said that was most surely true and I wondered why so many women wanted to have sex with them. Probably because they had money.
-
And then there's Twisted Sister.
I remember when I was in Grade 6 I convinced my mom to let me host a backyard trampoline party for my class. We'd make hot dogs and jump on the trampoline. My mom said that we should go to the video store and rent some movies, just in case it rained. At the video store, I saw a collection of videos for Twisted Sister's album, Stay Hungry. The lady behind the counter said that was a no-no because there was footage of Dee Snider eating meat and mouthing swear words and wearing makeup and bleeding from his mouth. We rented Duran Duran videos instead. It did not rain. But later, Jason came over and said he wanted to watch the Duran Duran videos. There were two of them that had naked ladies - Girls on Film and The Chauffeur. Man, I wish it had rained that day. My mom would have totally let me rent anything from Twisted Sister after that.
Actually, Dee Snider was a pretty cool cat. He once wrote a survival guide for teenagers and he probably would have been a swell friend to have. He would not have enticed me to worship the devil and probably would have encouraged me to keep going to church and to say no to drugs and alcohol. When Dee Snider testified before the Parents Music Resource Council (or whatever it was), he even told Tipper Gore that he still adhered to Christian values.
And, as a matter of fact, the song Burn in Hell contains some pretty good theology.
You can't believe all the things i've done wrong in my life
Without even trying i've lived on the edge of a knife
Well, i've played with fire, but i don't want to get myself burned
To thine own self be true, so i think that it's time for a turn
Before i burn in hell
Oh, burn in hell
Take a good look in your heart, tell me what do you see?
It's black and it's dark, now is that how you want it to be?
It's up to you, what you do will decide your own fate
Make your choice now for tomorrow may be far too late
Okay... so it's not a hundred per cent accurate. Christians believe that our works don't save us - only faith in the risen Christ will do that. But hey - it's still better than "let's do coke and bang some groupies and then vandalize churches and then go to Dairy Queen."
-
I need to go back to Aerosmith because in Grade 8, I was part of a lip sync competition. We were doing Walk this Way, the Run DMC version. Later, I was told that Run DMC just covered the song and then I heard the original version on Aerosmith's greatest hits album. I thought it was the best rock song ever made. I still think that today.
I kind of became an Aerosmith fan then and Permanent Vacation was one of the first albums I bought with my own money.
Here is what I think the songs on Permanent Vacation are about:
Hearts done time - About running around with bad women
Magic touch - sex
Rag doll - sex
Simoriah - a hot girl named Simoriah
Dude looks like a lady - transvestites
St. John - about a messed up guy who watches TV a lot
Hangman jury - About a man who kiled someone
Girl Keeps Coming Apart - about a high maintenance girlfriend
Angel - About breaking up with someone and then realizing you love them
Permanent Vacation - About going away somewhere nice
I'm down - About the need to cover a Beatles song
The movie - About closing Permanent Vacation with an instrumental track
(Side note: I hope this blog comes up as number one whenever someone types Aerosmith into a search engine.)
-
And then there's David Lee Roth.
We used to rush home from school to catch Samantha Taylor host Video Hits at 4:30. She would show videos from Duran Duran, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Thompson Twins, Hall & Oates and Billy Ocean. But when she showed a David Lee Roth video, we all went nuts. David Lee Roth videos were the best videos ever.
David Lee Roth was crazy and his video for California Girls remains my favourite music video of all time. I was 12 and watching David swivel his hips alongside two dozen bikini-clad models (minus the bodybuilder one, who was scary - Gen X'ers know what I'm talking about) gave me great hope for my girl-chasing future.
-
Honourable mentions;
Weird Al Yankovic: Saw him in concert twice. He started in 1983 and is still going strong today. Weird Al may even outlive me.
Huey Lewis and the News: Just because it was the first concert I ever went to. Went with my mom. 1986.
Quiet Riot: They used to be my favourite band and I used to think The Wild and the Young was the best song ever. Once, an old girlfriend climbed into my car and found a Quiet Riot tape in the glovebox. She looked at me and just started laughing. She was still laughing half an hour later.
Cyndi Lauper: She bop. What's it about? You'll only really know after you lose your innocence.
And I don't think I need to devote any more space talking about Prince.
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