Pre-Occupied with 1985, Part 9 - The Opus

VIDEO: Continued dive into The Writing Tub

The Story Behind the Story Part 1 (From the Dr. Mac Author Blog)

Well, here we are again. I’m filling in space this week because this has now become a ten episode Season. I'm also rambling a bit before I wrap this 1985 thing up.

Some folks will get that italicized word. Just like the folks who’ve already heard this story. If you checked out the video and the link above, then this is more or less old news.

As a kid, I had my head in the clouds a lot. But I was pretty good at hiding it. Or maybe being a bubble-brain living in the dreamworld in my head was squashed down because of this terrible sense of duty and responsibility I was inherently born with. 

(Ever take the MBTI Personality Test? One of these days you might, Younglings. The fake version, the free internet version, AND the pricey real one, that I had to take when I went through the state leadership program. ISTJ every single time. It hasn’t changed AT ALL in almost 20 some-odd years. If you know, you know. Here I’m always thinking I’m pretty hip, but nooo….I’m basically a Vulcan. And I totally married Captain Kirk. Go figure.)

Anyway…

Whenever I found life boring or uninteresting or unadventurous, as it usually is, especially growing up where I did, I would write stories. Where I had cool friends and wore awesome clothes and lived in exotic locations and rode horses and solved mysteries and made movies and starred on TV and modeled and went to the Olympics and won Wimbledon and won roller boogie contests and won lots of money in Vegas and played Madison Square Garden and drove a Porsche and traveled to outer space and had superhuman powers and saved the universe…

I read The Secret Life of Walter Middy in the second grade and could totally relate. There’s a lot of 💩 going on inside this head. There still is. And with all that “metal” floating around in there in June of 1985, I needed to write it down.

As I mentioned in the above Dr. Mac Author Blog post, it started as a short story. I had already had some stories in the Ebony Rose, MHS’s literary magazine (of which I, and Mike French, God rest his sweet soul, were editors our senior year), and I, of course, wanted to write more. You could also win prizes for specific genres so, duh. 

The story got longer…and longer…and longer, until it filled all those notebooks. And beyond. (And then, 21 years later, it was finished.) Needless to say, in the beginning, it didn’t make the cut as an Ebony Rose entry, but my one-act play, based on a band having their worst gig ever, won the prize for Best One-Act Play. Only because it was the only one-act play submitted. I don’t remember if it was even really published in 1986’s issue. And right now, it’s too hot to climb up into the attic to look, in another tub filled with more of my stuff.

I called it The Opus for years because I didn’t know what to call it. Now, though, that I’ve mapped out the remainder of the series, I have each book already named, drawing on song titles. It’s funny how when I finished that first “volume” (which is now two separate books), I was sad, because I thought that was it: That Kookoo musical world, the characters I’d grown to love, and hate, that I’d created were gone, and I thought I couldn’t go back there. 

Well…

The night I typed the last word, in that same room at 210 Gary Drive where I’d started it, a room that is completely empty now and will someday belong to someone else, that place inside my brain was suddenly flooded with more ideas. Those inspiring bands still play! They’re all over social media! They wrote memoirs! They’ve liked my comments on their Facebook posts! Mark Slaughter friended ME on MySpace! I shook Kip Winger’s hand in 2017!!!

Ah…The Opus could go on. #sorrynotsorry 

Pre-Occupied with 1985, Part 8 - The Fan Clubs - Gimme an R!

Hello, Younglings!

More from The Writing Tub! Another integral part of that time.

In 1985, Christine and I pooled our money and joined Helix's fan club. It was really pretty cool and we got newsletters once a month. I wrote to them exclusively about how she and I just loved the band and how I wanted to run off to Canada to become a rock star.

Yeah, that is as dumb as it sounds. (I didn't actually go to Canada until Poppa Don and I were returning from Spain via AirCanada and had to stop in Toronto (at YYZ!!) and change planes. That was in 2019. I visited again in September of that year when I was at a workshop in Detroit and took the bus over to Windsor for about 20 minutes. I was just going to hop into a pub and have a drink but...I was on foot, it started raining, I forgot I wouldn't have phone service over there, so I hightailed it back across the lake as soon as I found the bus station. The border office people were not super-friendly. So I guess that thing about Canadians being friendly is a myth.)

Eh? 

I'll go back sometime when I'm more prepared.

Anyway, Helilx's fan club "person" wrote me back personally, a letter dated July 16, 1986, and it had a wealth of insight for a 17-year-old wanna-be bass-playing superstar.

Feel free to zoom in and read it. "Jackie B" of Promotions said, "Being a musician is a very tough life." She also recommended to have an education to fall back on. Should I study music? 

Well, I kinda already had that one figured out, but I found this piece of advice very interesting.

I finally got to see Helix at Rocklahoma in 2009. I took this letter with me and got in to the Meet & Greet right after their set. Of the original members, Brian Vollmer (lead vocals) was there, (I spoke to him briefly), and Brent Doerner, their former guitar player was with them for that show, though he hadn't played in a while. I'm pretty sure Fritz Hinz (RIP) was drumming. The bassist and the other guitar player were guys I didn't know, but they made a comment about the date on the letter, as in like, "Wow, that's old." 

Everyone autographed it, and it was fun talking to Brent because he was complaining how hot it was. "It was so hot I had to lie down on the floor of the green room, man!" And I'm like, "Dude, it's Pryor, Oklahoma in the middle of July." He was hilarious.

By the way, he reacted to my Ozzy tribute video. He's been a Facebook friend of mine for years and always wishes me a Happy Birthday. Has for several years now. Christine would get such a kick out of that because he was her favorite.

And here is the autographed photo we got direct from the fan club right after we joined, during the Long Way to Heaven days. It's too bad they weren't more popular in the U.S. because they were really a good band. The only big song they had in the States was "Rock You."

That membership only lasted a year, and we didn't renew it after we went to HSU. Interestingly enough, when they released the Back For Another Taste album, they sent me a flyer for it. They obviously still had my address (or Mom & Dad's P.O. Box LOL). That was in 1990. I didn't buy that album until years later when I found a used CD on Amazon. It's not available on streaming so that's a bummer. It was some of their best stuff.

In 1992, guitarist Paul Hackman, my "Number #1 Metal Man" in those early years, died from internal injuries after their touring van ran off the road after a July 4th gig in Vancouver. He was only 38.  

I still follow the band on social media and they stay pretty busy. They're currently working on some re-issues of their earliest albums plus working on new stuff, and still rolling on the road.

So... Gimme an R!!

Pre-Occupied with 1985, Part 7 - The Attitude

Okay, so….this one is little heavy. Spoiler alert!

I had the “ganas”, the music, the wardrobe, the look, an instrument to get started (though not the right one just yet)…hours and hours of MTV, but something else was happening.

I was painfully shy as a kid. I still am, but I’ve learned to push through it, especially since it’s more or less a job requirement not to be. There are days when it’s still way too “people-y” out there for me and I’d rather stay in bed petting a cat.

However, one of the best changes to come out of my heavy metal transformation was the ability to talk to strangers and not sound like a stuttering moron. I didn’t literally have a stutter, but previous to that summer of 1985, the thought of speaking to someone I didn’t know terrified me. Sometimes speaking to people I actually knew terrified me. Some people probably think I still feel this way (and yeah, it pops up on occasion) and others probably think I never felt this way.

(Should we really care what people think? Do they even think about us anyway?)

I’ve always been able to go out on a stage and do “that” stuff. Being in a play, playing in the band and being the drum major, pretending to be a white Tina Turner, lip-syncing Duran Duran songs, blah, blah, blah, but that’s different for me. It may be in front of a large group of people, but there’s a huge invisible safety barrier between performer and audience. It keeps the masses at a distance. It was always the one-on-one I couldn’t stomach. Still can’t to an extent. For me, that’s too much exposure. You can hide vulnerabilities behind lights and costumes. You’re somebody else at that point.

Getting full-throttle into music, though, especially the kind that wasn’t very mainstream at the time, that helped me open up a bit. The more I learned and listened, the more I was able to relate to other people who were also fans. I can remember one particular day I was perusing the Walmart record section and there was this guy, never saw him before or again in my life, but he said something about some obscure metal band (can’t remember what), and I piped up with some comment because I knew who that band was, and some short conversation followed.

I would NEVER have done that prior to that day. 

From that point forward, I had more confidence, felt less like a socially awkward nerd (even though that’s never gone away), but I felt more like I was part of something more…cool? Listen, it was NOT cool to be a nerd in the early 80s. And it was definitely not cool to be a nerd in Southwest Arkansas. It was even less cool to be a girl nerd. (Now, my new interest in being a rock chick bass player came with its own set of contingencies later on, but that’s for a future blog.) So, this was a welcome change for me. Maybe not so much for the parental units, but I felt a little bit more liberated.

Being sixteen is a challenge anyway, and those “demonic” musical choices didn’t help in some ways, because I was also starting to develop that “attitude.” I’d never been rebellious. I followed rules and went to church and made good grades and behaved at school and had never touched an illegal substance. I didn’t date, because, well…I think people thought I was some kind of freak. I didn’t even “drag main” or drive around the old Walmart parking lot or hang out at the Cone-N-Cue because I thought that was kinda lame. When I did, with my new ability to drive the car by myself, I was home long before curfew, listening to my new cassettes, watching videos, or writing or, after Christmas that year, practicing. 

I was just different, I guess. And they say that to be “different” is to fight the hardest battle of your life every day of your life. I don’t remember how I heard that, or where that quote even came from, but it’s somewhat true. And with my new-found identity at that time, I had a lot to learn. 

But that’s what more blog posts are for!

Pre-Occupied with 1985 - Part 6 The Writing Tub

 Taking a first look into "The Writing Tub!"

Pre-Occupied with 1985, Part 5 - The Diet

Meaning...there wasn't one.

I never worried about food. I was blessed with a metabolism that would allow me to eat a five-course meal: appetizer, soup, salad, entree, and dessert then have a snack two hours later. Wash it all down with Coca-Cola and not gain an ounce.

Then I reached age 35 and it all went to sh*t.

But when I was sixteen? Perish the thought.

That summer I would go with Mom to the grocery store, (again when MaddOx was in the old Piggly Wiggly that became Fred's that became James' Foods) and buy Dr. Pepper, Canada Dry Ginger Ale, Shasta Black Cherry Soda, Brown Sugar Cinnamon and Strawberry Pop Tarts, Butterfinger candy bars...and that was my snack menu. I'd also partake of Oreos, Chips Ahoy Chocolate Chip cookies, both a big glass of milk. I also liked this tapioca you could buy in a can. I also used to get these microwaveable French Toast things (mainly when I was in middle school) and Lean Cuisine's Linguine and Clam Sauce (discontinued). Other staples were chocolate covered peanuts (or clusters) and Whoppers Malted Milk Balls. Other discontinued favorites were those Carnation Breakfast Bars (chocolate chip) and Figurines. Those were "healthy" snacks.

Breakfast cereal? Cocoa Puffs, Fruity Pebbles, Rice Chex, Corn Chex, and Cinnamon Life. And sometimes Nature Valley Granola. 

Photo taken 2016. Black Cherry soda is REALLY hard to find.

Also when I was in middle school, I did learn how to cook and bake. As a latchkey kid, who was home by herself all day in the summers, I would bake cakes and cookies (snickerdoodles were my favorite), plus I knew how to fry and scramble eggs, heat up canned soup, make redeye and white gravy, boil pasta (mac and cheese!!), and pop popcorn (in a pot!). I could fry hamburgers and brown ground beef. I could also make quick oats (not instant) and grits. I could chop vegetables. Memaw taught me the baking part, Poppa Bill showed me how to do the other.

Regarding other grocery shopping, there was no Walmart SuperCenter. In 1985, that area was a cow pasture, and remained as such until about 2000.

When Memaw started working at the bank, she would work until 6 p.m. on Fridays, and so we always went out to eat on Fridays. This more or less continued even when we had the shop because it closed at 5:30. We'd normally to the Fish Net out at Potter, or the Holland House. The Limetree was reserved for after church on Sunday. There was no McDonald's in Mena until after I went to Henderson. No pizza delivery, either, even though we've had a Pizza Hut for decades, back when Pizza Hut was an experience. (Poppa Bill wasn't a fan, but he'd eat it.) We had Sonic (which is now Cruizzer's), but that was rare for a supper meal. (I remember Memaw driving off with a tray once.) 

No such thing as Chinese either, but we had Suree's, which was more Thai food when it first opened. Her chicken curry was fantastic. 

Oh, we did have KFC. Remember when they had sandwiches? HAM sandwiches? And those cool little parfait things?

When we'd go to Fonrt Smith or Dallas, well, that was different. At Fort Smith, we once ate at Tomfoolery, and Mrs. Laura's, if we weren't having a Nana McChristian-prepared meal at their house in Greenwood on drill weekends. Homemade mac and cheese!!! And Nana always had huge kosher dill pickles in the fridge, Oreos, again, in her cookie jar, and Munchos potato chips, which I still buy every summer. We'd eat at the mall on those Saturday shopping excursions. Furr's Cafeteria at Phoenix Village. Or Luby's at Central Mall. 

Ah...the early days of Chick-Fil-A. The big pretzels with cheese. And this was before Central Mall had a food court. Those were in the Dallas Malls, where I tried gyros for the first time. Sbarro. I thought pizza by the slice was the smartest idea ever. Great American Cookie Company. Buy 4 get 1 free!

Also in the "big" towns: McDonald's!!! Arby's. A Beef and Cheddar is still a delicacy. I remember sitting at the Arby's on Rogers Avenue after an orthodontist visit and we had just bought The Truly Tasteless Joke Book. Memaw was laughing hysterically and everyone was staring at us.

Unfortunately, I'm currently on a juice cleanse so I probably need to stop talking about being a junk food junkie in my teens.

Not an 80s video, but it still makes sense.

Pre-Occupied With 1985, Part 4 - The Musician

The decision was made. Music it was going to be. No holds barred. I was most likely one of the most focused, if not completely delusional, sixteen-year-old girls wandering around Mena, Arkansas thinking she was going to be the greatest rock musician in the history of the planet.

Well, I did what I could.

I was already an “Outstanding Girl Musician.” 

I won that title at Junior High Band Camp after the 8th grade. I was destined for greatness.

That was playing the saxophone though. I did choose that because that was the closest thing to a “rock and roll” instrument available. I already knew how to play the piano. I could read music and was pretty good at picking things out by ear. In fact, that was why I quit piano. I played it like I heard it, not like it was written on the page. Sandra Curtis, my piano teacher, was having none of that. This would be a tremendous benefit to me later, though I didn’t know it at the time.

I HAD to play bass. Had to. No ifs, ands, or…but all I had was an old Spaulding tennis racket that I “pretended” to play bass with.

Jumping around my room shouting at the devil and running to the hills. It didn’t quite have the same effect. 

But I did have a PLAN.

Robbie had an old guitar in his closet he never learned to play. No brand name on the headstock. It had three strings on it. I went over to his house one afternoon; door wide open, TV on. Nobody home. Such as it was in Mena, Arkansas in the middle of the summer in the 80s. I took the guitar out of the closet, put it in the car, bought strings at WalMart, and took it home. Figured out by guessing how to string it. I called him that night and said, “I have your guitar.”

His reply: “Oh, great. I’m glad somebody’s gonna learn how to play it.”

I sat down that night with a Mel Bay guitar book that was Liz’s and got to work. The first thing I figured out? The opening bars of Dokken’s “Alone Again.” Well, that was easy! I learned some basic chords, a C scale. Some of other easy exercises in the Mel Bay book, which was Book 2 by the way. Moved on and picked out the opening of Judas Priest’s “Electric Eye” and Dio’s “The Last in Line.”

That’s as far as I got as a lead guitarist. I knew that was never meant to be and I didn’t aspire to that. Everyone wanted to be a stupid guitar god. Or a drummer. Or a lead singer (that would come later). I was going to be different. And be the bass player.

Well, just around the corner from Ye Olde Fabric Shoppe was the only other music store in town, and on display in the window was a bright Red Cort Slammer Bass with MY name on it. If I only got one thing for Christmas, that was going to be it. I didn’t care if I got anything else.

It will be mine. Oh, yes, it will be mine.

Pre-Occupied with 1985, Part 3 - The Look

Younglings, allow me to back up once again, and explain why the whole year, and not just the summer, of 1985 was pivotal.

Memaw had worked at First National Bank since 1979. Then all the sudden, she and Mamaw Lee up and bought a fabric store.

Oooo…kay. Didn’t see that coming, but that was another big change in everything that year. 

So, I remember her final days at the bank, when I was allowed to drive the car, a 1984 Pontiac Phoenix, by myself! (The photo is not the actual car - just one I found online. Someday I'll show you what it ended up looking like in the summer of 1990.) I must have gone to run an errand or something. Incidentally I remember being in the break room upstairs and there was an advertisement for some KTel (or other compilation LP) that featured part of the video to Scorpions’ “Still Loving You.” I had yet to hear the whole song but that day would come.

Anyway, we had a fabric store. And I “kinda” had a job there, but didn’t really make a salary. I learned to work the cash register and cut fabric and hunt down notions, but I also finished learning how to sew. I earned my keep by making all of my own clothes as store samples. The cool thing about that was that Appolonia (yes, THAT Appolonia) had her own line of patterns through McCall’s. I made about three of them. (Those are in another blog post…Say Goodbye to the Fabric Store. That’s a pretty interesting post so be sure to check that one out! Please forgive the formatting. For some reason they've changed the ability to edit the text for the photos). 

I made some pretty groovy things up until I went to college. I did try to con Memaw into buying zebra striped spandex in every color, but to no avail. I can also remember one Saturday morning we had American Bandstand on at the store and Giuffria was on there performing (lip-synching) songs from their second album “Silk & Steel” and Memaw said, “I don’t want you in a mess like that.”

Giuffria on Bandstand (I was for sure they'd done "I Must Be Dreaming" but...I must have been dreaming.)

I ignored her, obviously. I mean, Giuffria wasn’t exactly musically frightening. Now if Slayer had been on there…

Speaking of Giuffria, sometime earlier that summer I had bought Prince’s “Around the World in a Day,” decided I wasn’t that fond of it, took it back to WalMart and exchanged it for Giuffria’s first self-titled album. Probably a dumb decision, but oh well. I thought they were Journey at first; David Glen Eisley sounds amazingly like Steve Perry.

So, I had wardrobe options. However, you couldn’t buy ripped-up jeans already ripped-up in those days; you had to create them yourself, and you had to get creative to expedite the process. I had a pair of perfectly boring jeans, and soaked them in water and bleach. Didn’t quite get the results I wanted, so with either that same pair or another one (I preferred Levi’s 501 button-fly at the time), I opted to just pour straight bleach right on them in various spots. Okay, that was cool. The bleach weakened the denim enough to make some rips. I wore them to school one day sometime during my junior year and I sat down in first period journalism…and there went the entire seat of my pants. Luckily I was wearing a shirt I’d made out of some kookoo print that was like a cutaway tuxedo jacket, longer in back than the front, so I was able to make it to the pay phone outside the front of the office to call Memaw to bring me another pair of pants.

Lesson learned. Next…

I wanted to be Nikki Sixx. My hair wasn’t dark enough.

What?

No, it wasn’t black enough. It needed to be blacker.

Memaw, who had been more a beatnik in her college days at Hendrix, was helpful in this sense and introduced me to Clairol semi-permanent hair color. Choose light ash brown, she said, and it will be dark enough. And she was right! This, along with me taking pictures of Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora to the beauty parlors, shag haircuts and body waves in fruitless attempts to achieve BIG ROCKER HAIR, set the stage as it were for the next five or six years. No matter what I did, though, I always ended up looking like Eddie Van Halen. And yes, I had a mullet for a while but that was before 1985. We didn’t call it that, though. It didn’t have a name. 

Well. I had the look. Now I had to learn how to get THE SOUND.

Pre-Occupied with 1985, Part 2 - The Tunes

Back into the Time Machine…

I left off with my Washington pictures. Several packages of them, 24 exposures per roll. (These were the film days, remember?) And you may wonder what this has to do with becoming a metalhead, but hear me out.

Once I had them developed, the folks wanted to see them all. Well, just before they asked to do that, I was in the process of recording some songs off the radio. (Again, this was how we “stole” music in ancient times.) I had recently discovered 98 Rocks out of Shreveport, which I could pick up on FM radio if it was after 5 p.m. and the weather was good. I’d just put in a fresh, empty 90 minute cassette tape, and had just pushed record and play to capture Bon Jovi’s “She Don’t Know Me” from their first album that had come out the year before. I needed to catch up on all these tunes I’d missed, though I was well aware of Ratt, Twisted Sister, and of course, Quiet Riot. I even had their 45 of “Bang Your Head (Metal Health)” because every one else in the world did. 

I took my photos into the den, we looked at them all, (I wish I still had the one I took of the Washington Monument from the Jefferson Memorial one evening, but I loaned it to someone and never got it back. And like a young dumbass, I tossed the negatives, thinking…I won’t need those.) Anyway…when I got back into my room about 20 or so minutes later, the tape was still recording, and what AWESOME songs I’d collected:

She Don’t Know Me - Bon Jovi

We Don’t Need Another Hero - Tina Turner (Mad Max was a big deal that summer!)

Sentimental Street - Night Ranger

Lay It Down - Ratt

Sleeping in the Fire - WASP (I’d heard of them, not HEARD them. Still LOVE this song. It's on the cassette twice, to fill out the last of the blank tape on the B side. LOL)

I think this is where I came back in, because there’s a break before “Smoking in the Boys’ Room.” I added so much more. (In 2019, I made an Instagram post on my drmacauthor account about this tape: July 5, 2019). It was the ultimate soundtrack for that summer, and the catalyst for what became the “Rock Opus.” More on that in a moment.

Like I mentioned a moment ago, I knew who the “big bands” were, the ones emerging into the mainstream. Def Leppard had been around since 1983. Ozzy Osbourne was infamous. I was aware of Judas Priest (“Another Thing Coming” was played often enough), and I was vaguely familiar with Iron Maiden only by their t-shirts at that time. Maiden would become one of my favorite bands, especially after I bought “Live After Death” later that year. Whitesnake had been mentioned to me in Carolyn Osborne’s typing class that previous spring semester. What kind of name is “Whitesnake?”, I’d balked, only to become one of their biggest fans long before “Still of the Night.” “Love Ain’t No Stranger” is my favorite Whitesnake song. (Saw them live in 2019. They were awesome. Coverdale's still got it! Tommy Aldridge and Reb Beach were also playing that show. What a privilege to see them as well.)

My cassette collection, which could barely fit in a box with 12 slots in the beginning, started to grow. In addition to the bootleg Dokken/Crue tape, 1984, and Theater of Pain, I acquired what I could at Walmart, until those drill weekends in Fort Smith and the occasional jaunt to Dallas, where I always made an immediate beeline to the record stores. My first “metal” compilation purchase, the only one available at Wally World sometime in late May as school was letting out, was “Crazed: An All-Out Metal Assault” in which I discovered Y&T, Queensryche, Zebra, Dio, Armored Saint, bands I’d read about but was just now hearing. 

But I acquired two other albums that really set the tone: Helix’s “Long Way to Heaven” and Scorpions’ “World Wide Live.”

I was up one morning, with MTV on as usual, recording as many rock songs as I could, and they showed Helix’s video for “Deep Cuts the Knife.” Awesome power ballad. I’d heard “Rock You” so this one surprised me, with Brian Vollmer’s bel canto trained vocal versus the screamy thing. But who really caught my attention was guitarist Paul Hackman. Bling! My sixteen-year-old brain was IN LOVE. (I had no idea he was already in his late 30s and married.) He became THE Number One Metal Man. Christine preferred Brent Doerner, the other guitarist. We pitched in the $15 fee (an exorbitant amount at the time) and joined their fan club. 

“Big City Nights”, the live version from Scorpions’ “World Wide Live” album, played constantly on MTV that summer and they were scheduled to show the accompanying documentary one Saturday night after a pre-extremely famous Bon Jovi concert recorded in Japan. It came on pretty late so I couldn’t stay up to watch it in the living room, (my bedroom TV was coax cable only, so I didn’t have the bootlegged VCR connection), but I had learned how to set the VCR to record and then watch everything later, a major skill at the time. Lo and behold, there was a storm and the power blipped, shutting off the VCR right in the middle of the documentary. I was devastated. Practically had a mental breakdown to which my mother was not at all impressed. Why such teenage angst? Because back then a lot of things only aired once, and when it was gone, it was gone. Or if you were lucky, you could buy the official VHS recording, which at that time was probably about $50. (I eventually watched it all on YouTube in 2008, I think. A long time to wait.) 

This chain of events, the 98 Rocks cassette tape and the MTV recordings, eventually led to the Opus, but wait…there was even more leading up to that!

And here's the Spotify Playlist of that cassette, even with the repeat of "Sleeping In the Fire" at the end)

SUMMER 1985 

Pre-Occupied with 1985, Part 1 - The Beginning

And NOW, Younglings.....

It is now June 2025. And what a decade it’s been just since last September. But I'm not here to talk about that, because I think we've had enough of the heavy stuff. So I must reiterate that this year marks an important milestone in the life of your grandmother.

I have been an official rocker chick for forty years. Let me explain, and see if I can get the timeline right. It’s been a minute or two.

The year is 1985. Uncle Danny is only 5 years old. Aunt Tiffany is only 3. Aunt Storm, Aunt Kattie, and Aunt Cassie are barely even idle thoughts. Poppa Don is 24 years old and still in the Marine Corps.

I am 16. (Hence the previous post about the birthday party).

(Contemplate the age differences later, please, before you really start to think about it.) Moving on.

Ronald Reagan is president and the top TV shows are The Cosby Show and Miami Vice. There is no Internet. Mobile phones are the size of canned hams and ridiculously expensive. MTV is playing music videos. ALL DAY LONG. Shocking, yes. Those were the days. 

Now, in the ultra right-wing, conservative burg of Mena, Arkansas, MTV was The Devil. Even though it was part of local cable programming, it wasn't included in the channel lineup available at the McChristian residence on Gary Drive. But...thanks to some insider information provided by one of the high school secretaries, I was able to bootleg it through Dad's early-acquired birthday/Father's Day gift: A VCR purchased at a local video rental store for the whopping amount of approximately $400.

I'm not kidding. It cost that much. It was the size of a small lawn mower and had a remote control with a WIRE. The remote had three buttons: play, fast forward, and stop. It MIGHT have had a rewind button but I don't think so. Or record? I can't remember. You had to change channels by pushing buttons on the front panel of the VCR, numbered 1-20. On the top of VCR, next to the pop-up tape loader, was a panel you could lift up and assigned to each of the 20 channels were these little levers you could switch into 3 positions. On Channel 4, you could move the lever into position 2, then turn this little knob for more accurate tuning, and VOILA!!! MTV!!! For FREE!!!

It stayed on ALL DAY that summer, at least until Mom and Dad got home from work. I saw "Bad is Bad" by Huey Lewis and "Glory Days" by Bruce Springsteen A LOT. But there was this show that came on? Called "Heavy Metal Mania? Hosted by Dee Snider of Twisted Sister. Or at least the first episode was. The second one, which didn't air until September, was hosted by Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson.

I'm getting ahead of myself though. I bought blank VHS tapes, 3 to a package, and spent the summer days recording videos. Eight hours worth by the end of the summer, and eight more on a new tape in the fall. Again, I'm jumping the gun. I will get back to this particular playlist later.

Here's what was going on prior to June:

We FINALLY had FBLA March of Dimes Variety Show in April, after it had been postponed twice. I had bullied my cronies into putting on our "Herky & the Zerkx" lip-sync act and we were (sort of) a hit. 

During that time I developed a crush on the guy who was our "guitar player", who was a huge Iron Maiden fan and somewhat of a Motley Crue fan. Well, naturally, I needed to become one, too, of course.

I remember getting a ride home from my friend Jay Smith one afternoon and he had a vinyl copy of Dokken's Tooth & Nail in the car. (Why he was carrying around a vinyl LP in the car is anyone's guess but this was long before CDs and streaming so who knows.) Of course, I had to look at it and liked the lyrical content. I asked if he would tape me a copy. (This was old school file-sharing. Someone had an album on whatever medium, vinyl, cassette, or 8-track, and you recorded it onto a blank cassette. We did it ALL THE TIME. And nobody died. Not that I know of, anyway.)

He got it to me a couple of weeks later and I thought it was great. I had grown tired of Top 40 stuff, and needed a "boost." I wasn't fond of Tina Turner's new album (Break Every Rule) and Bryan Adams' Reckless was okay but not heavy enough. The "heaviest" album I owned was a cassette of Van Halen's 1984, because EVERYBODY had a copy of 1984, but I wasn't a huge Van Halen fan at the time. That would come later. (There were complaints about this album, what with the keyboards and all, but I really don't think Van Halen gave a crap).

Rockin' with Dokken, though? Brilliant! Something about George Lynch's guitar tones...It called to me. "Alone Again?" The penultimate power ballad. On the end of this cassette, I had enough room to bootleg a few songs from somebody's copy of Motley Crue's "Shout at the Devil." That might have been from Eric Dodson. He lived across the street from my best friend Christine and I vaguely remember being in his room looking at Circus Magazine while we were copying songs...I could be wrong though but that sounds legit. Those songs included "Shout at the Devil," "Looks That Kill," "Too Young to Fall in Love", and "God Bless the Children of the Beast."

Author's Note: At this writing, I could not locate this cassette but I know I still have it somewhere.

Eventually, I ended up with a REAL copy of Shout At the Devil. And well, the rest is history.

I bought a copy of a "Motley Crue Special Edition" magazine, most likely published by Hit Parader, from Madd-Ox Grocery (used to be Piggly Wiggly and is now James' SuperFoods), and well....the rest is history. I thought Nikki Sixx was the coolest person in the world. He had black hair and green eyes (like me) and he played the bass.

So, that was what I was going to play, too.

I had this epiphany. College was still two years away but I was on the fence about what I wanted to study when I got there because there was no doubt I was going. Drama? Journalism? Music? It had to be something artsy-fartsy, of course. Now that I was up to my ears in "heavy metal" and it was taking over my soul...Music won. My mind was made up. Rock stardom was calling.

I would hoard lunch money to buy Circus Magazine. I think I bought my first one at Walmart. The May 1985 issue with "Rock on Tour" on the cover. I ready EVERY WORD in it, from the full-page ads to the classifieds in the back. I did this every months for another three years - and I still have them all. I cut out pictures of my “Top Ten Metal Men,” glued them to poster board, and tacked them to my bedroom wall as well as the inside of my lockers at school. I still have those, too. They’re priceless, y‘know. Not only did I skip lunch for Circus, but also for Hit Parader, Faces, a couple of copies of Kerrang, and Metal Edge, which was one of my favorites. It had great photos.

When the Star Wars posters came down and the Motley posters went up, so did Mom and Dad's blood pressure.

Allow me to back up once again, though. Every minute of that year was ridiculously important so I don’t want to forget. Keep in mind that “We Are the World” had come out earlier that year and was HUGE. I had just spent the night at Christine’s house over on Cole Street the morning they announced the Live Aid Concert on MTV. I think it was Alan Hunter with Bob Geldof? Anyway, that was a big deal. We watched it together at her Mama Jean's house in Fort Worth, on July 13th that year, Harrison Ford's birthday.

On June 17th through the 22nd of that summer, Christine and I went on a group tour to Washington, DC with a bunch of other kids. My first time in an airplane. My “lil bro” Robbie Sanders was along for the ride, too. I took my somewhat hip 80s, Cyndi Lauper-ish wardrobe, my Radio Shack (or maybe it was RCA) Walkman, my bootleg cassettes, and the Crue’s latest release “Theater of Pain.” (Which I did locate). 

I also took that Crue magazine and Christine and I taped the picture of Nikki wearing nothing but a towel to the back of the hotel room door. I doubt housekeeping ever saw it, but we thought we were being so rebellious. The day we went to the Smithsonian, I wore my unconstructed white jacket with the black random stripes and listening to “Helter Skelter” the whole time. 

I also took that Crue magazine and Christine and I taped the picture of Nikki wearing nothing but a towel to the back of the hotel room door. I doubt housekeeping ever saw it, but we thought we were being so rebellious. The day we went to the Smithsonian, I wore my unconstructed white jacket with the black random stripes and listening to “Helter Skelter” the whole time. 

(How do I know the exact date of that trip? I found a boarding pass among some of the junk we just cleared out of Mom and Dad’s house. Wow. I'll add that photo later also.)

I wasn’t hooked up to the Walkman the entire time; I did enjoy the trip and appreciated all that I got to see. I took a lot of pictures with Dad’s 35 mm Minolta, and got them developed fairly quickly after it was over. This brings me to the next phase of that summer.

Stay tuned for Part 2!

Pre-occupied with 1985 - Prologue

1985. Not the song by Bowling for Soup, but the real year - 1985. Particularly the month of June. I was there. I was 16 years old. We finally had a VCR. I learned to bootleg MTV. But most importantly, I discovered...

HEAVY METAL.

The genre that has way too many sub-genres now but back then? Very different.

Let me give you some background information first. I’m gonna back up to my birthday that year. I even have pictures.

For some reason of unknown origin, I was in the dumps about people not remembering by birthday. (Sixteen Candles, anyone?) I was being a typical sulky teenager. So my mom said, “Let’s order a pizza and you can go with me to pick it up.” (Mena’s Pizza Hut did not offer delivery then.) 

We go. I sit in the car, a 1984 Pontiac Phoenix (a car that deserves a blog of its own), while she goes in to retrieve it and the box is about the size of a two-car garage. She had to put it in the back. I’m surprised we didn’t need to put the back seat down.

Naturally I ask what was with the huge box and she said it was all they had.

Huh. Okay.

When we return to the house, I see movement through the back sliding glass door, which should be somewhat alarming because Dad was at drill (as always on my birthday weekend) and that was way too big to be a cat (even though Squeaker, our calico at the time, weighed about 20 pounds). I recognized the movement because only Robby Sanders could flit around like that.

So I walk in and like a jerk, say, “Okay! I know what’s going on!!”

Surprise party, LJ. Duh.

In attendance were my bestie Christine Cooper, Alena Lintag, Darrick Wilson, Shonna Lowe, Janna Liles, Wes Sunderman, and my “Lil Bro,” Rob Sanders. At least that’s who are in the pictures. If someone else was there, well, I’m sorry. Most likely the weather was bad (typical early February) or folks were out of town for the weekend. But it was a good time anyway. If you look closely, it’s quite obvious I was very much in preppy mode, with my button-down oxford and the argyle sweater vest. I don’t know whose haircut I was trying to emulate as this was the pre-Joan Jett shag years. I’m sure it was some actress/musician/popular girl at MHS. Simon Le Bon, maybe? I was not wearing makeup.

Anyway, this was the magic age of course, for any teenager. So I was learning to drive, albeit not well, and I was still listening to a lot of Tina Turner, Prince, Stevie Nicks...the only “rock” album I owned at the time was Van Halen’s 1984. Because everybody else did.

I was also in the middle of devising our act, Herky and the Xerkz, for the March of Dimes Variety Show. It was quite the lip-syncing extravaganza: Kicking off with Van Halen’s 1984, then the opening speech from “Let’s Go Crazy,” and after some heated deliberation, the main song chosen was “Wild Boys” from Duran Duran, which is suddenly interrupted by the guitar solo from “Firehouse”, (thank you, Eric Dodson), and ending with...sirens. (I still have this cassette mix, although the first part was eventually covered with something else at a later date. I don’t know if that was by accident or not.)

We had costumes, choreography, borrowed instruments that wouldn’t be plugged in, and even rehearsals. This was a fine example of how bossy I used to me, conning my friends and fellow youth group members into doing something completely ridiculous, because Rick Davis’ Goony and the Goonheads would not be on the bill that year, and we would be the most talked-about act of that Spring! There were several of us: Me (as the “Lead”), Rob (as Herky the alien, wearing Dad’s old flight suit), Tara Osborne as the girl looking for Biff, (Eric Dodson), who was abducted by the Xerkz and turned into a rock star. (Yes, that was the premise. We were nerds before nerds were cool and WE DID NOT CARE.) The other cast of characters were Suzanne Drager (unplugged guitar), Sherri Bates (unplugged bass), and Missy Langley (un-beaten drums). Back up singers were my always-present companion Christine and Shonna Lowe. Darrick Wilson was the stray goof-ball alien carrying a broom pretending to be the singer, or guitarist, or...whatever. It was geek mayhem. And it actually took a lot of work. And I, along with Rob, didn’t just instigate this ordeal, I also volunteered to appear as “Tina Turner” between acts for the daily shows for the middle and high schools. I used to do a pretty good impression. Still can.

The date for the show kept getting pushed back due to weather and was moved to some time in April. More time to prepare, but also more time to maneuver some big personal changes in my life. The first being the shift in my next big “this isn’t going to go anywhere” crush, and the second, the more important one, being my continuing disinterest in Top 40 Music.

The shift in “crushes” was really the catalyst for the shift in musical tastes, because the latest “crush” was a metal head. And as summer approached, a lot of changes were about to occur...

Stay tuned for…the REST of the Story….

AND HERE'S THE PICS!

Oh I Am My Mother! - The Final Edition (?) 2025

 And here we are again, in 2024.

I don't have much to update, except that we've made it through another year as mothers, grandmothers, etc.

Cheers to all. Enjoy!

In honor of Mother's Day, I'm posting the article I wrote that appeared in HER magazine, May 2009 (back story - it has been edited):

Good day, Younglings. Mother's Day is Sunday, May 14. And that's why this blog gets re-posted somewhere on social media EVERY YEAR since its original publication.

Read on, Padawans, and enlightened you will be:

OH! I AM MY MOTHER!

Oh, yes! I definitely am! And that’s perfectly okay with me.

People have always considered me a “chip off the ol’ block.” Some women would have flames bursting from their eyes if anyone told them this, but not me. My mom is funny, beautiful, and doesn’t take a lot of crap from anybody. I for sure got the funny part, because if I can make people laugh, I’ve done my good deed for the day. I’m still working on the beautiful part. That always took some work, because my mother couldn’t get me to wear a dress or makeup without great gnashing of teeth. She’s been accused of dressing up to clean house. I’m accused of having too many dresses and not wearing any of them.

When I got married, I instantly became the mother of four. Then there was a fifth, but that's another story for another time. I helped raised two of them on an everyday basis: girls, age six and nine at the time. I skipped colic, diapers, and potty training and went straight to slumber parties and tubes of lipstick left in the pocket of a pair of pants that got put into the dryer.

After a month went by, I called my mother and said, “I apologize for everything I’ve ever done.” I was in my late twenties, so that covered a lot of ground.

All five of these children are grown now; four have children of their own. This made me a grandmother at 31. (I could insert one of those shock emojis here, but I’ll refrain.) It wasn’t until I started hanging with the grandkids that I really noticed how much I was saying things like, “Scat, Tom!” when someone sneezed. I haven’t started calling everyone “shug” yet, but that might be a future endeavor.

I was standing in line at the local discount shopping mecca noticing the covers of women’s magazines, and thought, “Gee! I knew that in the fifth grade!” How? Because my mother told me. She knows everything, like the names of obscure actors all the way back to the 1930s. My children now ask me, “Who’s that?” when old black and white films turn up on services that stream old movies, like Tubi and Freevee. Nine times out of ten, I know exactly who they are, thanks to excellent maternal guidance.

My mom and I definitely have different musical tastes, although she did think some of Poison’s tunes were kinda catchy. (I was a teenager in the 80s, so...) Without her, I wouldn’t have Frankie Laine and Andy Williams on my Spotify "liked" songs list, right alongside Black Sabbath and Metallica. “The Theme for Rawhide” coming on right after “Iron Man” upsets the passengers in my car somewhat, but you know what? I really don’t care. “Rollin’, rollin’, rollin…”

My mother loves to read, and I remember frequent trips to the library as a child. She introduced me to Stephen King, and we both had extreme fears of Plymouth automobiles for a while. (Remember Christine?) I don’t know if that explains my sister’s avid interest in the film version of Cujo, but oh, well. If I had time, I’d follow Mom’s lead and join a book club, but I don’t think “Building Online Communities: Effective Strategies for the Virtual Classroom” is on Oprah’s reading list.

Mother-daughter relationships are complicated. Every woman knows this. Especially if they survived their teenage years and still have both arms and legs. Several films have captured the dynamic: Terms of Endearment, Postcards from the Edge, Steel Magnolias, and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. (Hmm…three of those starred Shirley MacLaine. Wonder what that means?) Some women strive to be like their mothers, others…not so much. Who knows how the Kardashian's offspring will turn out. We won’t even mention Joan Crawford or the Octo-Mom. Maybe Shirley MacLaine could step in and line up everybody’s chakras.

I learned an entirely new facet of motherhood in 2021 when I lost one of my daughters, my youngest. There are no words to describe the devastation and the eventual emptiness the loss of a child can leave behind. I've known mothers who have lived this experience and now I fully understand. It's not a club one wants to belong to, nor is it a club that seeks new members. We'd rather you didn't join. Even though I wasn't there at the very beginning of her journey, I was there to prepare her for her final journey, that she was radiant, that she would "always be young, always be beautiful." That daughter was also a mother, and now as I watch her sons grow up without her, and remember my last moments with her, I realize that I, too, inspired her to say, "Oh, I am my mother!" 

And now, my mother is gone. On March 12, 2025, my mother went on to be with her Lord whom she served faithfully for all of her life. Her whole being was synonymous with the church, and I know she was welcomed with open arms by her mother, and her sister, and my father when she arrived. The end didn't go the way my sister and I had expected, but it was almost as if after my father passed last October, she felt like it was time to go, and then she was gone. This is the first Mother's Day where I won't go to visit, I won't make that phone call, and I will just have her memory, feel her spirit, see those "signs": a note she wrote I found among the things we moved from the house I grew up in, a piece of her jewelry, the many things she created and painted, a scarf she wore. What she was reading on her Kindle. The songs, the funny phrases, the ongoing inside jokes. I'm still trying to process it all; I'm in that other club, too, now. My mother isn't here for me to tell her the new things. But I have all the things that I've mentioned previously, the things that will stay with me always. 

In closing, regardless of whatever may have happened between birth and the day we looked at a stray digital photo and said, “Oh, wait! That’s a picture of ME! I thought it was my mom!,” one thing is certain: We are all shaped into who we are as women because of our mothers, no matter what the relationship may be. Some of us have spent every day of our lives with our mothers. Others were adopted, or separated from their mothers due to divorce or death or other circumstances. Be proud of those traits you’ve picked up, either consciously or unconsciously, and remember those special women on their day this month. Without them, you wouldn’t be reading (or listening to) this column, and I wouldn’t be writing it!

THANKS TO ALL THOSE MOTHERS OUT THERE!! YOU ARE LOVED!!