and Words
Better run
Run away
No time, to be a hero
You want to live to fight, another day
Don’t look back, look straight ahead
One wrong move you’ll be better off dead
Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.
There are foods that fit particular moods. The perfectly baked fish that flakes at the mere touch of the fork fulfills one of those moments. The softly fired filet mignon that separates at the gentle cut of the knife satisfies a different itch. However, occasionally we’ll encounter a moment that calls for bluntness instead of finesse. These times call for a greasy cheeseburger or a slice of pepperoni pizza with reddish-orange grease dripping from it.
In addition to food, there are a wealth of other guilty pleasures. There are movies and tv shows that lack the finesse of others but nevertheless feed your soul. Furthermore, we ride rollercoasters and skydive to elicit excitement. We drive at absurdly fast speeds, simply to feel of the warm wind in our hair and the thrill of that ride. Sex and the City‘s Carrie Bradshaw once mentioned that sometimes she’d buy Cosmopolitan instead of a meal because she felt that it nourished her more. Is there an equivalent for music?
Hard rock is my musical guilty pleasure; I’m not embarrassed to admit it. It all started with the likes of Def Leppard and continued from there. This tapestry extended to bands like Scorpions, Dokken, Bon Jovi, Quiet Riot, Judas Priest, and Metallica. Each distinctive on their own, but similar in their flavor. As much as any other type of music, hard rock is definitely on the soundtrack of my life.
I literally carried this music with me as I attended college. My years in school predated digital music, so I endured carrying physical media. This was in the form of a Discman or a cassette player, depending on the mood and the music. Cassettes allowed me the freedom to mix and match tunes from different albums onto recorded magnetic tape. I bore the additional heft of the packaged media as I nomadically ambled from building to building to complete my studies. It’s a burden that I happily carried for the ability to listen to music.
As I graduated from college, I discovered McAuley Schenker Group. It was with the release (and subsequent radio airplay) of their single, Anytime. As a college student of modest means, I rarely spent money on music; this was one of the few exceptions. My sister and I played this CD repeatedly in our sparsely furnished apartment. We’d open the sliding glass door to the balcony and bellowed the music onto the warm Florida night. The music emptied into the parking lot below, where we rarely saw any activity. Inexplicably, no neighbors ever complained; in fact, I don’t remember ever meeting any.
Michael Schenker, of Scorpions fame, was the guitarist for the group, which bore the familiarity from years before. As you listen to the music, you’ll realize that this is very different from the Scorpions. The Scorpions’ Klaus Meine certainly has a distinctive voice, with an accent that I didn’t place until I discovered that they were German. However, Robin McAuley voice is equally as distinctive. McAuley’s voice carries a certain hoarseness and urgency; paired with the right words and music, it was pure sorcery.
Though listening to this album takes me back that second-floor apartment I shared with my sister. We barely had furniture. It was sufficient enough for us to get sleep, conduct our studies, and little else. I don’t remember bookshelves; we had a drafting table which we used as a desk. We survived on a steady diet of pizza, which we often neglected to refrigerate, absentmindedly gnawing on slices from the night before.
She eventually gets a computer. It was an underpowered 386SX clone, which is basically dwarfed by any modern computing device, but it allowed us to do our work. In the dark days before the internet, we carried our work in floppy disks, wallet-sized disks about 1/8″ in thickness. We all carried our intellectual lives in these fragile plastic packages, subject to physical damage or magnetic fields… Or worse, forgetting it in public computers.
We both graduated while we lived in that apartment. I subsequently moved to the Seattle area to start work. I coordinated the move catastrophically poorly, and I ended up leaving Florida before the movers came to pack my things. My sister was instrumental in getting my college-aged life packed into my professional life in cardboard boxes.
Among those possessions was a copy of that CD by McAuley Schenker Group. I honestly don’t remember who paid for that CD, but it was legitimately both of ours. I may never definitively know if was packed absentmindedly or with a sisterly generosity, but I always chose to believe the latter. And to this day, it also reminds me of her kindness.
Years later I listened to this album for the nth time. While it played loudly over the speakers in my office, I finally took notice of this little tune, Destiny. Slowly over time, it has morphed into my de facto song of inspiration during moments of self-doubt. As I approached a charged conversation, an unsurmountable task, or an important interview, I’d play this song. I could hear McAuley’s voice in my head:
You hold the power in your hands
Control your destiny, make them understand
You are a part of future plans
Together you and me, we gotta make a stand
With that unforgettable voice, pounded into my head at the threshold of hearing loss, he inspires me. He becomes my partner as I navigate the task with a renewed sense of purpose and invincibility. I have a place in this world, and it’s there for me to take.
The emotional high lasts for mere moments, just enough to get me through the jitters. It’s the voice that mere minutes ago screamed into my ears that I indeed hold the power in my hands. In a world of finesse, sometimes we need that message delivered, not delicately, but bluntly. It’s the caveman approach, and at times, precisely what I need.