Once upon a time, in a far away land known as The Eighties, in a mythical realm some call “New Jersey” (as much a state of mind as an actual place), there were these young men and women, barely more than boys and girls, who did what so many young folks do when they come to that certain age, the age when the hormones start to sizzle and the flesh begins to sing, when the sky itself seems hardly big enough or the sea deep enough or the whole world wide enough to contain all the heady dreams, all the wild desire of burning teenage hearts: they got together in groups of four or five or more and just did what came naturally. . . they ROCKED!
They pounded their drums. They wailed on their guitars. They grooved on their basses. They sounded their barbaric yawps from out of their parents’ basement windows across the freshly mown green yards and over the low roofs of their otherwise quiet suburban town. Some played the hits of the day: Duran Duran and Dire Straits, Talking Heads and Simple Minds. Some played the music of rock icons: Zeppelin, The Who, Bad Company, Rush, The Eagles. They made big plans and dreamed big dreams and they played those damn songs over and over till they got them right. And when at last they took the stage of their high school auditorium and plugged in before their classmates they felt their insecure teenage selves transformed, metamorphosed, like superheroes zapped into new larger-than-life identities, wearing bizarre costumes and possessing wonderful new powers—rock stars for the day.
By the usual external measures of time–birthdays, grey hairs, sciatica, etc–it’s been a long time now since some of them gelled their hair (and some now don’t even have any hair to gel) and hit the stage. A few have continued to play, taking the Big Green Bus of destiny as far down the Lost Highway as they could go, never putting down their sticks, their picks, their musical dreams. Others have long since hung up or sold off their guitars and basses, put their drums in the attic, locked their voices up in cold storage, though there has remained always, somewhere in their souls, the secret cave with its cape and mask, its amps and its guitars, its drums and microphones, its scribbled lyrics. By the internal measure of time, that is, in some portion of their hearts and their souls it is now and will always be 1986.
And now a signal shines clear and bright in the night sky, two letters illuminated against the dark, calling to that hidden league, that secret tribe, telling them it is time to once again plug in and turn up, open their mouths and sing out, to feel their middle-aged hearts and souls restored to their fierce youthful vigor: Once bitten by the radioactive spider of rock always, always a rocker.
The signal is up:
GP
Geezer Palooza!
Be there or be nowhere.
Be there or be nowhere.
geezerpalooza 