* First concerts: Bon Jovi and Skid Row at Brendan Byrne arena, then a few months later the same bill at Giants Stadium, emceed by friend-to-the-rockers Sam Kinison. At the latter, Jon Bon laid down at the edge of the stage, pulled some lucky, lucky girl's face to his, and freakin' made out with her! The entire stadium (85% female, and the sexual orientation much of the other 15%, whether they acknowledged it or not, probably falling somewhere on the right end of the 1-10 gay scale) nearly fainted. It was part rock concert, part Chippendales show for adolescent girls.
* Nonstop MTV watching resulted in my today knowing shamefully little world history, but still retaining an embarrassment of history's most insipid lyrics ready for instant recall. (Just off the top of my head, a ditty from Warrant: "She's my cherry pie/ Cool drink of water such a sweet surprise/ Taste so good make a grown man cry/ Sweet cherry pie/ Oh yeah" )
* My pals and I subscribed to Rip magazine and pored over every issue from cover to cover. To this day I can name way more members of hair and metal bands than our elected government officials (Skid Row: Sebastian Bach, Rachel Bolan, Dave "the Snake" Sabo, and um, the drummer. What's-his-name with the long hair and no shirt. Fred Coury? No, that's Cinderella. Oh wait, it's Rob Affuso). Rip hepped us to the only social cause we cared about: anti-censorship, because the PMRC was threatening to censor our music!
We hated the magazine's editor, Lonn M. Friend, who was always trying to show how down he was with the rock stars (he later parlayed this into a similarly reviled segment on Headbangers Ball).
* Occasionally, we went to see our friends' bands play at an all-ages club called Obsessions. Going to Obsessions was major. The T-shirt you chose could determine whether you met a guy or not. (Well, the girls looking for some kinda action might have on some tight skimpy red or black top, but everyone else had band T-shirts.) For example, all girls liked Motley Crue and everyone liked Skid Row. However, not all guys liked Motley Crue anymore. (They weren't quite as tough as Skid Row, you see.) Therefore, opt to wear the Skid Row shirt.
(Or was it the other way around? I can't remember now which band was the "tougher" one, but I think this is pretty understandable.)
90.
* After Metallica's ...And Justice for All came out, and as we wisened up a bit, we gradually got into the harder stuff and away from the hair-based stuff. More guys were into the heavier stuff too, and they weren't as pretty, but that was a good thing; these ones were cooler. Patty became obsessed with Metallica and particularly fixated on their dead bassist, Cliff Burton. Every September 27th, in commemoration of the day he had died in '86 in a tour-bus accident, was Cliff day. I also observed Cliff day. I'm pretty sure Karin refused.
* Met my first boyfriend at the fireworks, the major social event of the summer. (Other than the mall and Obsessions, it was our only chance to meet kids from other schools.) If you took a little bit Jesus, a little bit Satan, with a helping of Scott Ian from Anthrax thrown in, dressed all in black, that's what my beau looked like. Which was a pretty hardcore combo for a young Catholic girl. (Are you supposed to be scared of your first boyfriend? Because I was.)
He was in a death metal band called Viscera who won the local battles of the bands. They had T-shirts showing a grisly skull impaled on a dagger with bat wings, and on the back it said, in lettering that looked like it was made from splattered guts (or, shall we say, viscera!), "Feed me life, feed me DEATH!" (I've recently unearthed this gem for special-occasion wear.) It was drawn by the b.f.'s best friend, who was reputed to have illustrated that one Slayer poster you could see at Alwilk Records. (You know, with the skeleton and crap?)
The night we met at the fair, at his Volkswagen where we were going to watch the fireworks from atop the hood, my new b.f. handed me one of their band shirts, saying, "Free for girlfriends." Free merch! It was my first day as a band girlfriend, and already I had reaped the only benefit of dating a musician. (Unfortunately, I would have to nearly double what my age was then before I would figure this out.)
* One night, after we'd learned about the backwards message in the Led Zeppelin song "Stairway to Heaven," the one that says, "Here's to my sweet Satan," Patty got herself all freaked out listening to it in her room, and thought there was a lady in white out on her roof outside her window, and that Jimmy Page was in a tree out there, and that on the wall, Cliff Burton (in giant blown up poster-sized photo form) was slightly moving. This was all without the aid of any substances, I believe, only her vivid imagination.
* Our friend was going out with this tall, skinny, really girlish looking, plump-lipped guy. I think his long, denim-clad leg-stalks were about the girth of other guys' arms. He had the "it" rocker haircut of the time--not quite a mullet, it was long hair shaved on the sides, more like a long, wide mohawk. All of this to us equaled one hot package, so we called him Hot Stud. Said friend lost her virginity to Hot Stud, and was eager to share that the song playing during the deed had been Whitesnake's "Slide it In." (The lyrics go something like this: "I'm gonna SLIIIDE IT IN/ right to the top/ SLIIIDE IT IN/ I ain't never gonna stooooop/ SLIIIIDE IT IN/ SLIDE IT SLIDE IT IN" and so on.)
* Though it was past prime Bon Jovi time, I couldn't resist obtaining a free life-size cardboard Jon Bon Jovi for my room when the record store at Morris County Mall was getting rid of him. Carrying my new roommate JBJ through the mall, I found my mom among the racks in Fashion Bug or wherever to present my prize. She shook her head, smiling.
Cardboard JBJ and his loaded six string now rock Patty's basement.
91.
* We could drive! That meant unlimited mall visits for my friends and I (Bridgewater was our home mall), which included unlimited swings through "Babe Central", where all the rocker guys and gals hung out but very little actual intermingling happened. There was a lot of lingering, checking out, hair tossing, T-shirt noticing, and smoking, though. It was a curious and brightly plumed subculture past its prime--still asserting itself as a presence, but its time was growing short.
At the record store, we hoped for an Alwilk Babe sighting and wanted to impress him with our usually pre-determined cassette purchases (perhaps Dangerous Toys, the poor-man's Guns 'n' Roses, would do the trick), but too often it was only pudgy old Alwilk Bob at the register, with his frizzy triangular hair mass, KISS obsession, unfortunate choice of stretch jeans, and chest hair poking out of his unbuttoned-too-far shirt. If Alwillk Babe was unavailable, our task was to pester Alwilk Bob. Alwilk Bob eventually turned the tables after he developed a crush on me, and would make the most unappealing references to wanting me to meet him out in his car when he got off work (among other things, now long since blocked out). This was all to the great delight of my friends, but it wrecked my enjoyment of the store after awhile.
* I was Patty's date for her brother's wedding. We got the bartender to serve us after threatening to tell everyone that he also cashiered at Shop Rite, and eventually our drink orders became demands: "FRANK! J.D. NOW!" Then we slamdanced to "Blitzkrieg Bop," which Patty's bro had thoughtfully requested especially for her. Afterwards, while full of Jack and Cokes, was the perfect time to call the $4.95/minute Rip hotline. It was supposed to be some kind of trivia contest, but all we kept getting was the same question asking for the real name of Motorhead's Lemmy Kilmeister, and no matter what we shouted, it went, "WRONG! TRY AGAIN." It was obviously editor Lonn M. Friend's fault, so we left a $4.95/minute "eff you" message for him on there, or at least thought we did. Showed that guy.
* Every Saturday night, it was: go to the mall, go to the diner, get to Patty's in time to watch the Young Ones, attempt to get drunk on booze filched from parents, watch Headbangers Ball (aka "the Ball"), hate Ricki Rachtman.
* Went with Patty and her boyfriend Bob (who was quite affable, but not the brightest fellow) and his friend to see David Lee Roth with openers Cinderella and Extreme at the Garden State Arts Center. It felt historic seeing DLR totally do classic Van Halen songs, 'cause like, those songs are HIS, man.
Just as a little background info, Bob had a denim jacket that violated all the unwritten rules of patch placement. Instead of one large back-piece patch with perhaps a few smaller band logos flanking it, the entire back of his jacket was full of scattered small band logo patches, giving the effect of a graffitid wall: WARRANT, GREAT WHITE, SKID ROW, DEF LEPPARD, BULLETBOYS, POISON, SLAUGHTER. Even to us girls, back then, it was the cheesiest thing ever. It was bad enough that we had liked those bands...guys were not supposed to, much less proclaim it all over their backs.
So Bob drove, and we were cruising down the Garden State Parkway, blasting Extreme, getting all excited for the show. Bob, the poor dear, got himself so worked up that he cried out, "WOOOOO!" and punched his windshield, cracking it nearly all the way across.
"Woah," he said, with his characteristic little smile, "I didn't know that was going to happen." People, this is what the PMRC was talking about--the violence that hard rock music brings.
* At that summer's fireworks, a group of four of us girls making our fairground rounds bonded upon realizing we were all Viscera ex-girlfriends. Those guys got around.
* Patty and I went to see the odd billing of Suicidal Tendencies opening for Queensryche at the Meadowlands. Everyone there was obviously in one camp or the other, either with caps saying SUICIDAL, or mullets, which pretty much said QUEENSRYCHE. We were on the Suicidal side. (It was usually cooler to be more into the opening band at a rock concert, anyway. It showed you were into the latest.) We got a ride from an older guy Patty worked with at Shop Rite. In the Meadowlands parking lot traffic, some tailgating dude was peeing facing us on the other side of a chain-link fence. "You buying?" he asked us. "Certainly not!" was our driver's indignant reply. "Then keep drivin'." Which we couldn't really do, because we were stuck in traffic. Patty and I puzzled for years about exactly what that guy meant.
* Change was in the air, blowing in from Seattle. For awhile now, we'd been branching out in musical tastes, but also still kept it real for metal.
92.
* We dubbed certain johnny-come-lately popular kids "trendies," the ones who (among other offenses) had never been into music really (or certainly not our music), but were suddenly into Metallica since the self-titled album had come out. The same kids who had gotten Patty's goat by taunting her about Cliff being dead, if they even knew who he was, now had front row seats at the concert because they were rich. One of them was particularly jerky, so Patty threw a desk him. Another wore the same Metallica shirt as Patty to gym class, so Patty glared until she changed out of it. That's our Patty.
* Crafted an elaborate scheme to skip play practice and sneak to the Metallica concert, which at one point was going to involve a friend wearing my Burger King uniform as my body double, who would later climb to her escape out of my bedroom window. Whatever plan we went with didn't work--I came home in rock gear reeking of smoke to find my mom waiting in the living room, and was so busted and grounded.
* Attended the Guns n' Metallica concert at Giants Stadium. During Metallica, there was a meathead mosh pit down on the stadium floor. Viewed from our nosebleed seats, the burly guys all looked like they were angrily skipping in a circle while pumping their fists. They were probably trendies new to their Doc Martens and the pit. During Guns 'n' Roses, I fell asleep during an extended drum solo. What can I say, Matt Sorum was no Tommy Lee in a flying drum cage.
l-r me & my bitches: patty, gigi, karin, roshan