moodyredhead

Day Six: A Song That Reminds You of Somewhere

I confess, I was totally going to cop out on this one.

It sounds deceptively simple — how hard could it be to put my finger on a song that reminds me of somewhere? But I couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t sound completely lame to me, especially if I was going to follow my rule of not duplicating artists.

So I created myself a little loophole, and decided that my “place” was going to be my first car. A 1984 blue El Camino, to be exact. Not much for a first car, but it did get me from point A to point B (and usually points C through ZZ, too) during my junior year of high school.

Now, El Caminos are notoriously ugly. Useful for carting stuff around, but unfortunate-looking. The only thing mine had to recommend itself was that it wasn’t one of those with the particularly nasty two-tone paint schemes. It was all one color. And really, it had air conditioning and a working cassette player, so what more could I ask for? (On an ironic note, if you look on eBay, they’re apparently now considered classic cars. Never saw that one coming. This one is a pretty good approximation of mine.)

And use the cassette player we did. My best friend and I rode around in that homely thing blasting all kinds of ‘80s hair band rock. Great White. Cinderella. Poison. But the one cassette that we played the most? So much that I had to buy another copy when I wore down the audio tape so much that it finally snapped? Def Leppard’s classic album Hysteria.

The song it snapped on, because we played it over and over and over? “Pour Some Sugar on Me.”

A funny thing happened when I watched the video, though. All at once it hit me — it’s not a cop-out after all. Because although a car probably doesn’t really count as a “place”, the Mid-South Coliseum certainly does. And on Sunday, February 7, 1988, I was at the Coliseum for Def Leppard’s Hysteria World Tour.

Now, I had been to concerts at the Coliseum before — John Denver (I know. I was six. Shut up.), Rick Springfield (I know. I was 11. Shut up.), Chicago (They’re classic. Shut. Up.). But this was my first all-of-us-out-on-our-own rock concert. And what a spectacular concert it was — loud music, in the round, complete with laser light show and a downright inspiring one-armed drummer.

I’m sure we were up in the nosebleed seats. Seventeen-year-old me couldn’t have possibly been able to afford really good seats, especially on my Shoney’s hostess salary. (Minimum wage in 1988 was $3.35, as it happens.) I also have no idea how we got away with going at all — on a school night no less. I do know that we managed to come out of it safe and completely unscathed. May have had something to do with the fact that we were such dorks that drinking and drugs and all those other scary rock concert things didn’t really occur to us.

The Coliseum will probably be demolished sometime soon. I understand why; it was already falling apart back when I attended Memphis State Tigers basketball games there during college, and play had to be suspended occasionally to remove fallen ceiling tiles from the floor. Memphis has moved on, through the Memphis Pyramid years and already on to the fabulous FedEx Forum. But it still makes me sad that the place I went to games and concerts and “Sesame Street on Ice” will be gone soon.

At least I’ll have my memories of hearing “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and other great songs there. After all, it still sounds just as good on an iPod in an SUV crossover as it did on a cassette tape in an El Camino.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 5th, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.