'79 in the City

When the bullying got so bad that I actually heard myself asking my father, “Do you think I died and have already gone to hell? Like, I’m in hell now?” my folks and I decided it was time for me to transfer out of Catholic school. I switched midway through seventh grade and was eager to make new friends. Joe and Gavin were rock heads, fans of several groups whose grandiosity I couldn't relate to -- Kansas, Pink Floyd -- but I wanted to hang with them, so I ended up listening to some stuff and going to some shows where I felt like an impostor. Boy, were Joe and Gavin excited when "The Song Remains the Same" Led Zeppelin concert documentary was going to screen at the Oriental Theater. They built it up as being a near-religious experience of awe. One of the great nights of my life was on the horizon, they told me. It was 1979, I think. We sat toward the back of the theater, the 8-foot tall seated Buddhas beaming their red light eyes from arched alcoves up and down the sides of the theater. We were probably the youngest kids there, at 12 years old, and late-1970s hippies from the Midwest possessed a simmering menace, contrary to the peace & love beads stereotype. There was percolating tension in the air. The movie starts and there are those skinny long-haired men in Zep projected at heights of 20-feet tall each on the giant screen. The double neck guitar. The glazed eyes and sweaty faces. The film was playing for all of one minute before the restless hippies started yelling, "turn it up!" The projectionist didn't hesitate. The volume went up all the way, into eardrum–rending, distortion territory.

"Does anybody remember laughter?" What the fuck was Robert Plant talking about? This concert was the least funny thing I had seen in my life. There were dream sequences of John Paul Jones playing a towering pipe organ surrounded by candelabra and John Bonham wearing a pinstripe suit and toting a Tommy gun for a bank heist. When the bullets started flying, the victims were spigoting multicolored blood. It was a projection of the bad acid trip I would mercifully never have, having figured out at a young age that my subconscious existed quite close to my conscious mind and that LSD might incinerate what remained of the scrim between the two realms. Nevertheless, I felt the movie singe my neural synapses absent any drug besides a large Sprite. We exited onto Farwell Avenue. There were multicolored neon signs and I could make out the contours of a German pub across the street. “…uznt ‘at great? ‘ucking A,” Gavin or Joe said. We walked next door to the diner for French fries with gravy and a shake.