Rock and Roll Music, Volume Me

This is the true story of how I became a fan of the Beatles:

I was in junior high, 7th grade, trying my hardest to be cool and fit in. Well, I was living in rural Louisiana at the time, in a place that wasn't even a town. I thought of it as a speck of cartographic dust located down the (Mississippi) River Road from a suburb of a suburb of New Orleans, an "accidental township." It was called NORCO, an acronym which stood for New Orleans Refinery Company. You may have heard of it. The Shell plant that sustained the town exploded and made national news in the late '80s, which began a litigious boom and gave many of the un- and underemployed of the township a purpose in life again. And a little acting experience. Playing the whiplash victim requires a costume and an acute awareness of how one acts when in actual pain.

Call my prepubescent years a cultural experience.

Needless to say, most of the people there were affected by the chemicals that bathed the atmosphere day and night. On some evenings, a horrible rotten-egg smell would go prowling and infect the entire populace. Those same streets were warmed by the midnight sun of the refinery flame, which had an eerily appealing glow. I would pretend it was Tuscany at sunset or the cabaret lights of Paris.

So, while trying not to stand out as much as I knew I already did, I was psyched to inherit some metal and hard rock tapes from my uncles in Sioux City, Iowa. Hell, yeah! Now I could add to my burgeoning repertoire of hot Dokken licks and creepy Iron Maiden lyrics. I was particularly excited about the obscure On Through the Night Def Leppard tape. "Man, how cool will I be? This record came before 'Photograph,' dude!" I thought. Imagine my chagrin when the tape in the case was actually the Beatles' Rock and Roll Music Vol. 1. "This is old-fashioned faggy music. This sucks." But my curiosity nagged at me to listen.

It was so catchy, so delicious, I wanted to jump out of my skin with joy and relief. I felt like I'd just raided the Halloween trash and devoured all of the grape Pixie Stix that the other kids had thrown away in disgust. I had a sugar high. I was jonesing for more. And I was so ashamed and embarrassed.

I kept my Beatles love in the closet, listened only with headphones, while I blasted more appropriate tunes like Motley Crue, Billy Squier, and Led Zeppelin. That is not to say that I turn my back on my actual love for this other music. Rat and Poison (my first official concert) and the others gave me a language in which to speak to the other kids in the trailer park and on the bus. And there is a satisfaction I will get from listening to it to this day.

But it can't compare to the secret, deep, private affair I began with those catchy Beatles melodies. An affair that I'm proud to say has become a live-in situation, an engagement, a commitment, if not its own sort of marriage. I thought it was sticky-sweet dreck that I had to hide at the time--like my femininity, like my sensitivity, my attraction to other girls, my drawings and my poetry. It was like admitting I was in love, that I even had the capacity for love. Sure to elicit sarcastic "Awwww, isn't that sweet!" taunts (and then possible violence), I hid it--all of it--until I could let it loose openly, freely, without judgement, without hatred and taunts. And scream like all those girls in the '60s did. Scream with abandon that I was saved by this music, that I was set free to feel pleasure and joy. That I could feel at all.

Now that's rock and roll, mother fuckers.