As a 12-yr-old, I'm a hesher. But I'm not a hesher of the meat headed variety. I'm more enlightened and self-aware. I'm loyal to my dinosaur bands, the Stones, Led Zep, Deep Purple, the Who, Jethro Tull, Cream, and what have you, but I can feel and see the transition happening right before me. It's happening on the radio, where Marshall Crenshaw and Elvis Costello are peppered in between Crosby Still and Nash and the Doors. It's happening in the record stores, posters of Hendrix and Clapton replaced with Graham Parker and the Rumour and the Pretenders. And it's happening at school. A handful of cool high school kids are wearing dark overcoats, sporting neatly cropped mod haircuts, and bringing their Stiff Records singles in with them to lend to their friends. I'm only 12, but I'm already an anachronism. The trouble with latching onto music so early in childhood is that I connect with what's available at the time, in the early/mid 70s, so that now I'm stuck in hesher land. It's not so easy to transform your identity when you're 12. So much of mine is wrapped up in hesher rock. I can't just abandon everything that makes me who I am. But I'm really curious. I make a clandestine trip to the record store and purchase a copy of Argybargy. And I can't believe what I hear. It's so fresh and new and different. It's hookier and more tuneful than anything I've ever heard in my life. And I feel like William Tell, as if my musical cherry is being taken all over again. I play Pulling Muscles (from the Shell) about 50 times. Same goes for Another Nail in my Heart. Same goes for If I Didn't Love You. What's with those weird harmonies that aren't really harmonies, where one guy sings the melody regularly in the high register while the guy singing in the low register does the same melody, only much lower, so that he sounds like a frog? It's not exactly David Crosby and Gene Clark, but it works. A whole new world is opening up before me. I'm hooked. I want more. But I'm also so frightened of change. I've already had some jarring changes in my life and I know I don't like the way it makes me feel. I'm wired for continuity. Jimmy Page and Pete Townshend will always be the best guitarists in the world, won't they? Is it possible to conceive an order of things that's any different? You might as well tell me that blue is green, air is water, dirt is chocolate... Music is about so much more than the tunes embedded in the grooves of the record. Who will I be and how will I act? I'm too young and inhibited at this point to get a haircut and sport one of those long coats. I've still got my army jacket, my long hair, and Highway to Hell. It's me, my essence. I'm a hesher. Some kids, mostly a few years older than me, are able to just show up one day and be completely changed from what they were. I recall this one girl, probably in 10th grade at the time. She goes home on Friday as a nerdy girl who loves horses, cats and difficult crossword puzzles. She's a wholesome girl, the teacher's pet. She comes back on Monday looking like the bastard child of Wendy O'Williams and Richard Hell. Me, I can't do that, or at least I can't do it so quickly and dramatically. It needs to be a process, one where I tell people what I'm doing as I'm doing it, making sure that every step of the transition is explicitly spelled out and acknowledged. I'm preternaturally conservative that way, and also anal retentive and neurotic. I tell my friends that 'hard rock' is still my favorite, but I also really like Bowie (who has crossover appeal), the Jam, Squeeze... Privately, Squeeze becomes my favorite. Their stuff is just too infectious. It's almost like children's music, only with cool, grown-up themes, the kind that are starting to make sense to me as my body changes, and so do the bodies of the girls around me, and so do my thoughts and dreams and desires. There's a brief window in my life where puberty is actually kind of fun. See? Sometimes change is ok. No need to feel guilty or scared. The new music guides me through it. I can't get enough of it. Yet there's also that part of me - still with me today - that wants to hold on to the past. It feels like a tug of war. I can't really reconstruct things in any great detail, but I muddle through all this with something like a split personality...
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