Sunday, September 19, 2010

What A Lucky Girl I Was

Another Sunday, another kidney stone, another day of watching rockumentaries on youtube. Seeing these (today I've watched the stories of Led Zep and Ozzy Osbourne), I just realized how lucky I was to grow up when I did. There was so much music, so much incredibly original and unique musical talent to grow up to.

Among the bunches of kids I grew with (we moved a lot and I made a lot of friends along the way) we all had older siblings. I had 3 older brothers who were all into music. So though I wasn't a teenager until 1972, I already had inherited Cheap Thrills, The Doors Live, lots of Beatles albums and scores of early folk and rock cuts on 45s. Really, until today, I never saw what an incomparable time it was in music.

In High School, when my end of the Boomers were coming into their own, genres within rock were already established. We loved David Bowie and Elton John, Yes, Floyd, ELP, Led Zep- some of whom had already been playing for a decade- and new bands like KISS and Fleetwood Mac (the reincarnation sans Peter Green) and the Eagles were just making it. Bands were playing huge venues like Madison Square Garden, and later, the Meadowlands arena and Nassau Colliseum. Going to a concert was a huge event for us, especially when there were several bands on the bill. Unfortunately we were all so often tripping and drunk we didn't get to keep vivid memories of the whole thing. I have a great memory of a MSG cop dragging me away while Chris Squires was fistpumping back to me. Or when the roadie for Twisted Sister threw me over his shoulder and ran into the dunes with me where we had wild sex. That's the sort of memory you keep, flashes of your life like that. It's a blur, a marvelous and wild time that I wouldn't trade for anything.

Watching these rockumentaries takes me back to those days. My god, what a lucky girl I was.

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