How I Became Your Gigi - Blog for the Younglings: Pre-Occupied with 1985, Part 2

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.)