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!