The music was loud, the crowd was rockin’, we had flashing lights, some cute girls, we were performing our asses off…
In 7th grade, square in the middle of 1983, our junior high school hosted an “air band” contest. And my rock and roll dreams were about to come true! After a year of the mixed bag of early 1980’s vanilla Top 40, I had just discovered Def Leppard’s “Pyromania” and my world was changing. I waited in front of MTV for hours on end, desperate to catch their big pop-metal hits like “Photograph” or “Rock Of Ages”.
I was not one of the popular kids, I had plenty of friends, but I was definitely not in the cool crowd. I had a limited supply of Lacoste shirts and OP shorts, so I made it work. But I did like music a lot and collected records and loved watching MTV. So this contest sounded like a great time to me! I don’t remember exactly how it all came together, but before long, we had our “band” and next we just needed to pick the right song…
On bass, as Rick Savage, was my friend Adam. He played an actual saxophone in the school band, so I guess that made him the one real musician in the band. He wanted to be a doctor when he grew up. We held a number of “rehearsals” at his house, which mostly meant we waited around for Def Leppard videos to show up on MTV, flipped through his Dad’s adult magazines, and ate a lot of snacks.
On one guitar (Steve Clark) was Andy. Tall, thin and angular, he “held” his air guitar more like ski poles with one hand higher than the other, lips pursed, giving it all he had. His mom and my mom were friends from a very young age, so we more or less grew up together, but we weren’t super close. We liked baseball and used to collect baseball cards together. He loved the Red Sox because he had family from Boston. I liked the Montreal Expos but I don’t know why. I had never been to Montreal, still haven’t, didn’t know anyone from there. It was my way of rebelling.
On the other guitar, Phil Collen, was a kid I’ll call Randy (not his real name). He was a new kid to the school, and he was smart. But he was trouble. He lived with his mom and younger half brother in an apartment kind of far from school. He and I got to be pretty good friends, and he was a huge metal fan, with streaky blond hair, and he could definitely wail on the air guitar.
One day, he turned up at school in some spiked wristbands, a red and white sleeveless shirt and leather pants, toting an LP copy of “Pyromania” and looking like he’d stepped out of a music video. When we’d talk about school, he knew everything, but was always in trouble for not turning in his assignments. But mostly we liked to talk about music, and I was thrilled when he gave me his copy of Pyromania one day…well, I think it was his, but his younger brother’s name was scrawled on the front cover in Def Leppard-style writing.
On drums was a guy called Scott. I still don’t know how he ended up with us. I wasn’t friends with him before or after.
Which left me: on lead vocals, Joe Elliott! With my short brown hair and no sense of metal style whatsoever, it was up to me to rally the masses and rock the house!
We were a weird bunch. Kind of mismatched, definitely insecure, but just having fun. We started planning our “act” and figured we had an ace in the hole. There was no lighting or anything cool at the school, so we were left to our own devices. And then we found Justin and Jesse, twin 7th grade brothers and science geniuses, who figured out a way to create bright light flash effects to go off during our set, every seven or eight seconds. A bunch of random blasts of light. For no real reason other than we thought it looked like rock and roll.
We just had to pick the right song, because we heard a group of more popular kids were cooking up something pretty cool, and there was no way we wanted to lose to them. We were sure the lighting was going to put us over the edge. “Photograph” and “Rock Of Ages” were big hits, with big choruses – we’d have the audience screaming along, girls would be throwing themselves at us afterward! We just had to decide which of the two massive hit songs to pick…
…so for some reason we scrapped them both and chose “Foolin’”.
We picked the one with a slow-building, moody beginning, all in a minor key. It’s a great song, but it ain’t a shout-it-out-loud crowd pleaser. But yeah, that was our choice.
Something about poor song choices and me…
After one or two more “rehearsals” at Adam’s house, we were ready to go. Randy was sporting his aforementioned outfit, looking fierce. We made fake earrings by clipping the tops from pins with wire cutters and rubber cementing them to our earlobes, not that anyone could see them. We contemplated actual piercings but no one could muster the courage to jam a need through their earlobe.
I was rockin’ a sleeveless black t-shirt and navy cargo pants, with a Def Leppard painters cap I’d won at the Arizona State Fair. Someone gave me a pair of parachute pants for my birthday but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was so self-conscious about wearing them that I wore them to school one day…under my jeans. Not a feeling I am eager to replicate anytime soon.
We were second to last on the bill. Strolling out on the cafeteria stage, we put on our game faces as the bewildered parents clapped and a few kids and teachers cheered. Randy and Andy played the opening notes of “Foolin’” and I stepped to the mic…..except there was no mic or even a mic stand.
Our show totally rocked! Adrenaline kicked in for me to the point where I actually executed a David Lee Roth-type splits-kick maneuver as the first chorus kicked in, and I didn’t even hurt myself! A bunch of flashes went off, randomly. And then they went off again. Randy crushed his guitar solo in the middle of the song, and we blasted through our air-band fantasy, feeling like stars! We were sure we’d won the contest with our energy, my scissor kicks, and the wizardry of Jesse and Justin!
…until the popular kids came out to close the show. Bastards! The biggest hit of the day was “Cum On Feel The Noize” by Quiet Riot, a metal hit so big it went top 5 on the pop charts. Out came those kids, running out from backstage during the intro, with two dudes perched on the shoulders of the other two, doing the overhead rock-and-roll clap, and Quiet Riot blew the doors off the cafeteria.
We finished in second place.
It was the end of the band, as we all had to pursue other interests, and we had a math test the next day. Adam actually did become a doctor, a brain doctor. Andy ended up in banking somewhere in the South.
I don’t know about Scott, I still don’t.
Randy was another story. We stayed friends, and our moms took a liking to each other. She was always lamenting how Randy couldn’t keep his act together, though. I found out he stole the money to get the cool clothes he was wearing. He went to a different high school because of where he lived, so we didn’t see each other every day. When we were 14 and freshmen in high school, I helped him get a job at the fried chicken place where I was working, but after a couple of months, he quit showing up and got canned.
I kind of lost track of him after that. We’d get updates from his mom that he was in college in northern Arizona, then dropping out, drifting, living in shelters and fiercely battling demons. At one point, she said he’d become a father. He had family in Ohio, so she thought he’d maybe gone out there. Then one day, in 1999 or 2000, he showed up out of nowhere in the Arizona record store I owned, dressed in a suit, stinking of stale cigarettes. We talked for a few minutes, but that was the last I’d heard of him. A few years later, we got the news he’d been found dead in a homeless shelter, outside of Cleveland. An obituary noted that he had become a computer technician, and that he’d tried out to be a contestant on Jeopardy.
He was a good guy who helped introduce me to rock and roll, and for a few minutes back in 1983, we had a load of fun, being the (second) best (air) band in the world.
Mixtape 