More crippling nostalgia

I’ve been listening to nothing but Van Halen for the past week now and I can say with all the conviction of a zealot: David Lee Roth has it all over Sammy Hagar. No mistake: Hagar is a consummate professional. His time fronting Van Halen created some of the most popular and lasting songs the world will ever know. Dreams. Right Now. Love Walks In. Finish What You Started, Top Of The World, Why Can’t This Be Love…. Anthems all. Dreams, in particular. MW loved that song. She played it on endless repeat during her ‘dancer-size’ when she spastically moved around to the music. Great times.

And let’s say it wasn’t crafting lyrics for hard rock songs; no, let’s say it was plumbing. And I needed to hire someone to unclog my toilette. I would absolutely hire Hagar. He’s the pro. I hire Roth? Fuck, who knows? Next time I sit on the throne, I’m just as likely to get a toilette water enema as a straight flush.

But for Rock ‘n Roll? Roth, hands down. He could surprise you with a clever (stupid?) turn of the lyrical trick; or give an un-called for yelp…. He was unpredictable. You know exactly what the next Hagar lyric is going to mean and how it is going to sound. In a word: perfect. Roth? Not so much. The context might be really, really stupid or the expression might be unnecessarily overwrought….

That’s Rock ‘n Roll.

And Hagar never came close to the gleeful inanity of “Happy Trails” or “Ice Cream Man”.

Look: Can you picture a gap-toothed, stop-motion Claymation hamburger strumming a guitar, flirting with French fries, and dancing around to a Hagar song? No. No, you can’t.

RIP EVH. RIP the 80s. RIP all potential I might have had.

Okay, less alcoholic moaning; more HD:

MW has a stay-at-home job answering phones for one of those home shopping networks. Of course, she can’t do the work, so I have to sit next to her, telling her what to say and do when the calls come in. So what? Well, for starters, I have my own full-time job and every sentient moment not spent at my actual job is dedicated to cooking, cleaning, and preparing life for MW. So, this piss-ant phone job severely cramps the schedule. Sitting next to MW, making sure she doesn’t fuck up this job, keeps me away from preparing food and organizing the house.

There have been two nights this week when I haven’t had any sleep. Like, none. I’ve got that bone fatigue that causes mental lapses and hallucinations.

I’m drinking double time to account for it all. Shit, I’m going to see and hear things that aren’t there – yeah – I might as well be drunk for it.

 ***

The crippling nostalgia comes and goes. I really thought I had put it behind me this time until Mr. Bob – I have great hair – Walkenhorst posted this song/video tribute to Steve Phillips.

And I’m devastated all over again. In particular, the lyric – “Hey! Let’s go set the world on fire!”

This comes upon the heels of an intense feeling of loss after Mr. Phillips death. He. Defined. My. Youth. The Rainmakers were with me through everything – my parent’s divorce, subsequently moving from school-to-school, every mix tape I made for any girl who ever smiled at me in High School contained at least one of their songs (depending upon the perceived sophistication of their humor; Big Fat Blond. But then, if they were the tragic type, No Romance.)

None of those mixed tapes ever worked. I didn’t get laid until college. Always magnanimous, however, I never blamed The Rainmakers for that. They were Rock Stars. Not Jesuses.

Regardless, I cannot overstate the impact Steve Phillips and The Rainmakers had on me during my formative years. Check it: as a youth, I fancied myself an artist (see Coffee for Crows), so I had a washing-machine box full of drawings I’d done during my teen years. I stored them in my grandfather’s basement. Decades later, when I uncovered them, I found rat turds – Yick! – so I threw the whole mess away. Not before shuffling through and finding many, many drawings I’d done modeled from cassette covers and KC free press clippings of The Rainmakers. I wish I’d’ve saved them. Oh, no. They weren’t very good (see Coffee for Crows), but they were my connection with my youth and that band. Both, sadly, gone now and forever.

Lost to time.

Which brings me to the point – “Hey! Let’s go set the world on fire!”

I wanted to do just that. I set myself up for just that. I failed. I suppose, at the end of the day, I did have two books published and an IMDB screenplay credit. Nobody read those books or saw that movie, but I was able to brag about it to my millennial nephew in this way; “Yeah, I spent twenty years writing stories and never made a dime. But then again, I never spent any money to publish my books either. I was just good enough to fool somebody else into doing that for me. Which means I’m better than E.L. James.”

Now let’s dovetail this regret to our Huntington’s Disease journey. I married MW young – I was just 20 years; she 24. At that age – it’s a scramble! Can we make rent? Can we afford groceries! Hey Now! I got a job at Compaq computers! The world is opening up for us! Then HD starts creeping in from the corners. It doesn’t happen overnight; but it does happen: I begin to realize MW isn’t… quite there. She makes bad decisions; or worse, she’s incapable of making decisions. We watch as her mother degenerated into the final stages of HD and black clouds form over my head.

“Holy shit. The storm on this horizon is fucking huge!”

And huge it is indeed. In fact, it washed me and everything I’d ever hoped for clean away. The one thing you must understand – unfortunately, something that nobody who isn’t familiar with HD can ever really understand – is how miserably slow that huge storm moves. The washing away isn’t as dramatic as a California mudslide. It’s more of a perplexing Texas City subsidence. Erosion upon erosion until we find ourselves backed up against the cinder blocks. We’ll be down there with the fishes soon enough. And not the normal fishes, like bass or catfish; no, we’ll be in the deep water with those freaky tsunami fishes that have periscope eyes, Dracula fangs, and that glow in the dark.

Freaks of nature. Huntington’s Disease in a nutshell.

“We always think there’ll be more time.” That’s the second lyric from Walkenhorsts’ eulogy that stung like a hornet. “More time.” 

 

 

Crippling Nostalgia

 Four years ago, I struggled through a bout of crippling nostalgia. No, really, believe it or not, there is such a thing. Well, kind of. The phrase is used more to deride people who don’t keep up with the times, but psychologist do recognize nostalgia as a serious problem.

Anyway, I worked through it by buying a bunch of shit off eBay and this, but now it is creeping back, brought on by the recent deaths of Steve Phillips and Eddie Van Halen. During the scant free time I have, I’ve done little these past few days other than listen to Rainmakers and Van Halen albums. I’m not ashamed to say, some of the songs have brought tears. Okay, I am ashamed to say that – I’m a grown man, I don’t cry during Eruption. And I wouldn’t, except that my life is in such a shamble, and that music is so joyfully, muscularly secure…. It wets my cheeks.

Those songs take me back at impossible speeds to the 80s; before booze and Huntington’s Disease and… all this. I’m recalling snippets of my life as a teenager in agonizingly clear focus. Make no mistake – I was just as mixed up and pathetic as any kid during those days. But at the time, I most certainly did not believe they would be the best years of my life. Yet here I am: crowding 50, in poor health, and a slave to two masters – the bottle and HD. Neither of which gives me a moments peace. Turns out those stupid, feckless high school years would be the best of my doleful life.

And I fucking squandered them.

An eye-doctor adjusts the lenses on the cumbersome device I’m looking through to see the past: Click clack click. “Better worse or about the same?”

Early 80s, Junior High it would be, I’m hanging with a friend and his older brother has some kids over to skate on their Half-Pike. Neither my friend nor I have boards (not that they would have let us take turns if we had), so we’re just watching. The older boys are playing Van Halen’s 1984 on a boom box. They wear torn jeans and no shirts. They smoke. Most of the skate-action is plebian – little more exciting than a handicap ramp – but every once in a while, one will catch air and come crashing down on his ass. Hilarious!

Those were the coolest kids I’d ever – or will ever see. And they rocked Van Halen.

Seems to me like there were a lot of older brother types around back then, and many of them had electric guitars. Ask nicely and they might let you mess around with one for a minute; some might even take the time to teach you a thing or two. Hey now! I’m playing Smoke on the Water! But then they would put Van Halen in the boombox and play Eruption and you’d realize you’re not holding something safe. You’ve got a king cobra in your hands. You’d better drop it or learn how to play.

A few years later my parents would divorce. Note that this was the mid 80’s, mid-America and being the child of a divorced couple made you somewhat of a scandal. Not that I minded. In fact, it was probably the most interesting thing about me. Aside from that, I was talentless, boring, aimless and weak. Then my mother uprooted me in search of affordable accommodation that would take me through four different high schools in four years. Again, I didn’t mind. I figured I could reinvent myself in these new environs. Nope. I was still the same shy nerd in different zip codes. But I briefly attained… not glory, exactly, but call it almost normalcy, when I made friends and had a passable social life in Collinsville Illinois High School. I actually had a girlfriend! She let me get to first base (no, really!). And there was a teen-club called Panama Jax. And the unofficial anthem of that club was, of course, Van Halen’s Panama.

There was a confounding maze of back roads around that club. Some of which terminated in dead ends butting up against farmers’ fields. Would I remember those back roads? Probably not; actually, I’m certain they’re gone now. I’d bet my life all that land has been developed. But I’ll never forget what I got up to on some of those back roads. With my girlfriend. And first base. And Van Halen on the cassette player.

In the late 80s, Israel and Palestine had nothing on the conflict between David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar. I sided with DLR, but even still, I could not deny the catchiness and pop-power of Van Hagar. Their tapes begrudgingly found their way into my collection.

Not as popular, but much more personally impactful, I’ve already written about the Rainmakers. During those years, I was never further than an arm’s length away from a Rainmakers cassette.  

“Better,” I tell the doctor. “Much better.”

Crippling nostalgia. Indeed.

More

 Big Fat Blonde hooked me. Big Fat Blonde in all its glory, playing mono from a single-speaker clock-radio settled on the kitchen counter tuned into KY102 on a freezing November morn in Lansing, Kansas while mom cooked oatmeal and we listened for school closings (please! Oh Please!).

I can’t remember for sure, but I’d like to think school had closed. And I’d romped in the snow. Rolling and tumbling in the white stuff with the gleeful call “Sew-weeeee!” echoing in my head.

What I do remember with certainty is that I received The Rainmakers eponymous tape as a Christmas gift, and was allowed to listen to it in our K-Car’s cassette player during our post-holiday ride back from St. Louis to Kansas (the I-70 series). Rocking good time! Until the last song, Information, came on with those quasi-PMRC lyrics.

The car’s mood chilled. Father promptly ejected the tape and replaced it with the new George Thorogood, just in time for Wentzville.

This sticks in my memories as I now know how Father (sadly departed - also way, way too early), whose parenting skills ran the gambit from Absenteeism to Bemusement, must have received those lyrics.

His alcoholic sister had died from liver cancer at an absurdly young age and his brother was put in a sanitarium after having a breakdown when his lover died from AIDS.

Of course, I didn’t know any of this at the time. I was just a wee-un who loved The Rainmakers for their Rock and Wit and – oh, did they just name drop Chuck Berry? My Ding-a-ling*!

It took years – decades – of catching snippets of slightly inebriated conversations for me to fit the pieces together. That song must have resonated with Father. How could it not? The lyrics were right from his diary, for fuck’s sake!

Anyway, by then it was too late. Divorce and distance had separated my father and I inexorably. When he called to tell me about his pancreatic cancer; he did not bother to ask me to visit and, since I was embroiled in my own Huntington’s Disease drama, I didn’t bother to offer. Six months later he’s dead. I could not even attend the funeral.

The only thing we ever shared – without ever acknowledging it – was the last track of The Rainmakers eponymous CD.

It was enough.

RIP Steve Phillips.

*some associate Chuck Berry exclusively with Johnny B. Goode. I do not like those people.