Quote:But in April of ‘75, I had no idea what good music was.  Then I heard KISS.
I was in our overly large kitchen one day, in the middle of Easter vacation, doing the dishes, with the radio cranked.  The station, AFRTS -- Armed Forces Radio-Television Network -- was a thoroughly middle-of-the-road station, but it was the only, and I mean only, English-language station in Teheran, and so it was turned up.  It was some time between the Bay City Rollers and Captain and Tenille that the DJ spun a record that was as subtle as a groin-pull:  “Rock and Roll All Night” .  The sound pouring out of the radio, electric, alive, was a sound I’d never heard before.  It was like Chuck Berry on acid.  It was recognizably rock-n-roll, but the guitars were stankin’ with fuzz  and the melodies tugged at heartstrings of which my eight-year-old brain was unaware.
It made me want to move my ass.
Thus was I made aware of music:  I found myself dancing at the end of the song.
I still had no idea what good music was.

It wasn’t long after that that the same DJ, Ted Hawkins, played the song that was to change my life forever: “Do Ya” by the Electric Light Orchestra.  In those days before Walkmans®, we carried our music around on what came to be called “ghetto blasters” or just “blasters”; and I was doing so one day in the park with our huge Sony, grinding my skateboard on the stair-rails when I heard this incredible sound pouring out of my speakers.  I immediately stopped my riding, in fact, I almost fell, and I gave the radio the attention it commanded.  The sound was unaccompanied electric guitar, three simple chords, and to this day it sends chills down my spine.  It sounded like a thousand sheets of paper being ripped, in tune, like the fabric of the world itself being torn apart, this guitar did, punctuated by dead silence.  It was the sound of my ears being yanked open.
That afternoon I made up my mind that I was going to take up guitar.  I had to make that sound.

Quote:And I mustn’t leave this section without mentioning my Grandma Redding, who lived in Pittsburg, Texas.  On our visits, we’d always spend a week or two with Grandma Redding, and usually Mom and Dad would be over in Dallas hi-jinking with their friends and whatnot, and during those times our religious upbringing consisted of hours of televangelists --  Jimmy Swaggart, Oral Roberts, and Billy Graham being the local favorites.  Grandma Redding only accepted one excuse for missing those shows -- that of doing Manly Things.  Thus began my career keeping the crows out of my Uncle Rip’s feed-troughs, once I was old enough to handle a .22.  He’d pay me a buck a head to shoot the things --  gophers and squirrels too.  My Grandma Redding didn’t mind -- I was doing Manly Things.  This is not only where I got to be a good shot but also where I grew to love hiking.  (I’d also help Uncle Rip clear his traps, many of which were deep in the woods -- this, too, was a Manly Thing).  God, I felt sorry for my sister, who was bidden by gender to the home, in Grandma Redding’s thinking.

Quote:The Wednesday of the party had finally rolled around, and, trying to conserve my money for more useful things than cab fare, I rode my bike the five miles over to Greg’s flat to help set things in order.  The Porteouses lived in a four-story building with the Waldens, the Copenhavers, and one other American family whose name I no longer remember.  The entrance to this building was a long driveway, about two hundred feet long, which sloped down to an underground parking garage about one hundred and sixty foot square and supported by columns.  This was to be the site of our soiree.
It needed a lot of work.  Being below ground level, it was dustier than a shelf-full of Liberace records, so our first task was to sweep out all twenty-five thousand square feet and hose the entire floor down. Having done that, we started moving furniture down.  This consisted of spare furnishings from the bedrooms of the seven or eight teens in the apartment building, and provided a motif of random seventies kitsch;  one can see the same school of design nowadays in a thrift store.  Plaid abutted naugahyde, and brass struggled mightily with wood-printed pressboard.  We brought down Danny Porteous's Marantz stereo, Mike Walden's "bitchen" album collection, and Tammy Walden's blacklights and posters.
The liquor arrived about six P.M. with Todd Porteous and my sister.  Having no idea how many were going to show up, they'd filled up a Peykan taxi with the works, so the ten or so of us present set about unloading the taxi bucket-brigade style.   They had gotten cases of assorted beers -- Schlitz, Tuborg,  Heineken, Budweiser -- and a crate filled with bottles of liquor:  rum, brandy, several different whiskeys, and peppermint schnapps.   It was around then that the party-goers started drifting in by twos and threes.  After all that work, I was filthy, and so I repaired to Greg’s apartment and cleaned up for the shindig.
I found a vastly different party upon returning downstairs.  With the sun no longer filtering down the long driveway, the lighting was candles and Coleman lanterns punctuated by strobe.  One corner of the garage was studded with teenage couples grooving to overly loud disco.  We shouldn't have bothered sweeping the floor; we could’ve just cranked the tunes and let the bellbottoms do the work.  I found the bar that had been set up in my absence, and cracked a tall can of Schlitz.
It's pointless to try and recount the party blow-by-blow; either you were there or you weren't.  I remember very little of my first drunk:  I remember making out with Courtney Taylor, finally, and how good her lips felt on mine, and how I worried if my hand was too far up her thigh, or not far enough.  Her lips felt good, her hips magical.  I remember Danny Porteous and some guy named Ricky getting into a fight over the latter's spilling a beer on Danny's stereo.  I remember hearing  Black Sabbath for the first time.  I'm told I drank a few of cans of beer and had two rum-and-cokes, and that I was cool until I tried to give a trick-riding demonstration on my bike, which ended up with me power-sliding into one of the concrete support posts.  Judging from the scrapes and scratches on my bike, it was one hell of a wipeout.   Oh,  and I remember my sister getting too drunk and throwing up all over the floor.
Mostly I remember the worst  headache I'd ever had, come the next morning.