Irrational Rock-N-Roll Fears of a Perpetually Terrified Youth

Why Marilyn Manson and Slipknot never meant shit to me - not after Anne Murray and Dan Fogelberg!

Look, I’m Catholic.

That means, throughout my life, lots (and lots) of stuff has scared me to paralysis and flipped me out endlessly and sometimes that’s been good - as in John Waters‘ wisecrack about gratitude for growing up in the Roman faith “because sex will always be dirty” (quoted most often, to me, by overstuffed “yoni“-invoking broads, many of whom want you to believe they just made it up on the spot, right there, between gulps)  - but other times it’s just … fear itself.

Rationally and irrationally.

The terror of the True Church reverberated especially powerfully when I was a kid, born in the year of Rosemary’s Baby, raised in the era of The Exorcist and drawn, seemingly supernaturally, to the things most verboten by the Papal Canon and The Tablet alike.

Horror movies were one thing, because you’re supposed to get scared of Frankenstein, Freddy Kreuger and, Heaven help us, Old Scratch.

The most heart-stopping fright-source for me, then, emanated from rock music, in particular heavy metal, which didn’t even really seem to carry that tag in a big way until I was old enough to go alone to Sam Goody and Spencer Gifts and just stare and stare at posters of guys who were not only unafraid of Satan - they were actively courting his cloven-hooved high-fives!

“But the devil is so evil,” I reasoned at age 10. “Don’t they realize that he’ll punish them worse for worshiping him? What fools! What damned fools!”

Of course, I wasn’t thinking metaphorically - like, in the sense that alcohol consumes the alcoholic as he consumes alcohol.

I meant that KISS - whom I actively believed were operating under an acronym for Knights in Satan’s Service - would spend eternity in a far danker corner of Hell than I would, because whereas when I rubbed my boner on the back of the church pew in front of me and liked it, at least I knew it was wrong to do, but Gene, Paul, Ace, and Peter were so stupid as to think that acting righteous on behalf of the Father of Lies would result in, ha-ha, righteousness.

Thus my fear felt well-founded in the faces and auditory onslaughts of AC/DC (Highway to Hell, “Anti-Christ/Devil Child”, “After Christ/Devil Comes”, Angus Young’s horned baseball cap), Blue Oyster Cult (what was that crossy-hooky logo thing anyway?), and Led Zeppelin (the t-shirts on Brooklyn’s local skeeze-bag adolescents, male and female, attempting their first mustaches were hair-raising enough), let alone - shudder and (big) gulp - Black Sabbath.

By the time I was really aware of him, Alice Cooper had already entered his Hollywood Squares phase (with The Muppet Show looming), but the mere prospect of the possibility of the theoretical existence of Black Sabbath absolutely chilled my every bone.

Black Sabbath unscrewed the wheels on my wagon of Catholic sanity.

Because if there were people calling out to and bowing down before The Ultimate Evil, as Black Sabbath clearly seemed to be doing, then it meant that anything was possible. At least here, in this world. I already understood about the next one.

Of course, it wasn’t until the 1990s that I realized that the protagonists of Sabbath songs are always petrified of the fallen Lucifer and his minions - a fact I first saw pointed out by Lisa Carver in Rollerderby - but my core issue was right.

People are capable of any atrocity. True is nothing. Permitted is everything.

KISS would eventually become my favorite non-Beatles rock band in a tie with Sparks, Melvins, and Butthole Surfers (the last of whom provides my cell-phone ring-tone: “Satan! Satan! Satan!”).

And rock-n-roll, I’d come to accept, really, seriously is the devil’s music. But that’s really, seriously groovy, too. Man.

However, that doesn’t mean I didn’t carry the rock-n-roll fears of my youth into an entertaining realm of irrationality. I did. Just look:

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AEROSMITH - “Toys in the Attic”

More than any other rock song I can think of, “Toys in the Attic” seems to emanate from within you, the listener, starting somewhere soul-deep and rushing out like a possessed locomotive, complete with a skeletal conductor flapping his mandible, going “Yah-yah-yah-yah-yah-yah-yah-YAH!”

The invocation of toys upset me because it suggested danger to children, of which I was an eight-year-old example when the song was released.

The album cover’s anthropomorphic playthings pulling a curious toddler up into their unimaginably perilous realm fired my own imagination in terrible directions.

Did I ever return from there? No one can be sure.

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JETHRO TULL - Too Old to Rock N Roll: Too Young to Die

Again, “too young” followed by the word “die” here made me perceive it as a direct threat.

And that name, Jethro Tull.

I figured he was some diabolical character that the fist-pumping loon on the cover had named his band after (for some reason, very early on, I could tell that Lynyrd Skynyrd, Pink Floyd, Uriah Heep, et al, were not individuals. What a talent. Even then).

Other Tull album titles, A Passion Play and The Broadsword and the Beast, would have scared me, while contact with their covers would have prompted me to fill my Garanimals right there in K-Mart.

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DAVID BOWIE - Diamond Dogs

To this day, it’s hard to pinpoint what, precisely, is so stomach-turning and nerve-splicing about the Diamond Dogs album cover, but there it is.

Bowie seemed mildly scary to me in commercials for The Man Who Fell to Earth, but even as Ziggy Stardust and The Thin White Duke, I kind of “got” the glittery freak-play he was up to.

But then I just happened upon Diamond Dogs and oh, fuck, that picture is so … atrocious. Haunting. Scarring. Awful.

And it still is.

Just recently, in 2009, I was treating my Ziggy-loving seven-year-old nephew to some trinkets at a rock-themed gift shop and the only Bowie-related item they had was a Diamond Dogs refrigerator magnet.

I handed it to the kid and he just looked at it, agape. “David Bowie’s not wearing any pants,” he said.

“Well, he’s supposed to be a dog,” I answered. “But is that picture freaking you out?”

“Yes,” he replied, with admirable honesty.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s get the Sgt. Pepper magnet.”

Diamond Dogs: the gift that keeps on giving. Nightmares. To children.

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ANNE MURRAY - “You Needed Me”

Unlike her effect on Lester Bangs, the sex appeal of smart-coiffed, vintage MOR Canuck tune-oozer Anne Murray never really got my AM radio antenna pointing due north.

To me, Anne’s magic as Easy Listening Empress felt entirely cozy as opposed to carnal.

Her voice, though glazed, felt as warm and inviting as an artificial bear-skin rug into which one could happily curl up and snuggle into ecstatic oblivion before a crackling fireplace, right on the floor of an adorable rural Nova-Scotia log cabin.

“Snowbird” is irresistible by any sane standard, and I’ll take her “Danny’s Song” over Kenny Loggins‘, but consider that my all-time favorite Loggins track is “Nobody’s Fool”, the theme from Caddyshack II (1988).

“Rambling With Gambling”, my mother’s morning radio show of choice for her entire 60-plus years, did its part circa 1975 to make Anne’s “The Call” a minor hit, but its lyrics did rattle me a little. It’s all about our girl standing on a busy street begging for change so she can use a pay phone.

Still, that out-of-character urchin role-play didn’t brace me for “You Needed Me” in which Anne Murray actually confesses to pledging her eternal being to Beelzebub!

And what’s more, we even sang “You Needed Me” in church!

Here are the actual words upon which I obsessed circa Fall 1978:

“I cried a tear
You wiped it dry
I was confused
You cleared my mind

I sold my soul
You bought it back for me

And held me up and gave me dignity
Somehow you needed me.”

I could not get over the revelation: “I sold my soul.”

Again, abstract thinking had not yet emerged in my tender consciousness.

The scenario of brokering a deal with the Son of Perdition in which he provides you with whatever earthly delights you can imagine in exchange for his being able to torture your undying life essence was not an easy thing to mull over.

Surely I was susceptible to such a proposal. I’d even come up with contractual terms in my head. Like, all the time.

But unlike the 1977 Paul Shaffer-Greg Evigan sitcom A Year at the Top, this was no joke. Nor would Mr. Roarke be around to hammer out cosmic loopholes in the contract, as he did when Roddy McDowall he guested as Mephistopheles on Fantasy Island.

Thus I was entirely perturbed when Anne Murray cited the practice of selling one’s soul.

And, as mentioned, it got even weirder when Our Lady Help of Christians musical director Sister Elizabeth added “You Needed Me” to the regular roster of acoustic guitar jams during folk mass.

In fact, the only more amazing ditty I ever sang at an official church-sanctioned Celebration of the Eucharist was the mighty “One Tin Soldier”, theme from the even mightier Billy Jack (1971).

It even said on the mimeographed singalong hymn handout: “Music and lyrics by COVEN.”

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DAN FOGELBERG - The Innocent Age

Perhaps it was lawless New York City of the 1970s, perhaps it was my wing-nut alkie Green Beret dad, perhaps it was The Devil Himself - I don’t know - but for whatever reason, I grew up feeling profoundly unsafe.

I was also weak, even for a tot. Skinny, then pudgy, then fat. Pathetic. Defenseless. A pussy most foul, pure despicably globular milquetoast by the time I reached sixth grade.

Plus these were the days of milk-carton kids and TV movies about youngster abduction and murder and worse, and I hated the fucking world, and there was nothing I could do about and I still can’t.

Everyone wanted to kill me - including myself! - and who could blame them?

Still, all this made me very sensitive to violence, threatened or executed, against children.

And that’s what I saw when, in Korvettes, I came across the album cover of The Innocent Age. It was a doll propped up against a tombstone, for Adam Walsh’s sake!

Yes, the perpetrator was Dan Fogelberg. Mr. “Longer Than“. Mr. “Heart Hotels.”

And here was his grim manifesto: The Innocent Age.

From this personal Fogelberg Necronomicon came the craven anthems, “Leader of the Band” (about his recently deceased high-school music teacher father), “Run for the Roses” (about pretty Kentucky Derby horses), and “Same Old Lange Syne” (about his love-rrr at the grocery store and the snow turning into rain one poignant Christmas Eve).

For all the black/death metal and power electronics I’ve listened to, for all the extremist pro-rape/homicide/castration literature I’ve read, for all the intentionally ghastly crap to which I have subjected myself post-puberty, nothing has iced my blood more perfectly than that Dan Fogelberg album cover.

But that doesn’t mean you (or anybody) should stop trying.

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