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Indulging memories of bad hair and righteous power chords

Indulging memories of bad hair and righteous power chords
- Mark Morford
Friday, January 19, 2007

I never had the right hair. This, I believe, was the ultimate tragedy.

Not that I didn't try. But no matter how many straighteners and blow-dryers and bottles of blond hair dye and fabulously toxic 99-cent Aqua Net I unleashed on it, my follicles circa 1986 invariably forced their way into the world as an incredibly curly brown mop that ended in wicked frizziness -- a white-boy Afro-mullet, if you will -- and hence trying to grow it out into long messy gorgeous rock 'n' roll Bon Jovi locks was like trying to crossbreed a mangy lion with a Brillo pad. It simply wasn't meant to be.

This, I believe, was my ultimate rock 'n' roll downfall. This is why I never made it big. Or maybe it was the discovery of, you know, books. Art. Actual coherent thought. Whatever.

The hair thing, it is an epic and untold personal tragedy that recently came to light as I prepared an awesomely disturbing DVD slide show of my early days for my recent '80s-themed birthday party, scanning in old grainy pix from my rock star-wannabe years in L.A. and noting with pained delight how it was, sure enough, tight Levi's and shredded T-shirts and cheeseball poses and faux-badass middle-class swagger, all fueled by 49-cent Top Ramen and cheap beer and huge, greasy pizza slices at 2 a.m. on a grungy, spit-soaked hooker's-paradise Hollywood Boulevard long, long before that strip became the Vegas-like tourist mall it is today.

It was a time. It was bad food and better drugs and much happy monosyllabic grunting, big bangs and odd-smelling apartments and sleeping till noon and big crotch-rock pop-metal anthems in the era of Mötley Crüe and Guns N' Roses and oh my God I'm sorry to say even Poison and Def Leppard and Tesla. I am so not kidding. Some people have old wedding albums or records of their first mortgage payments, photos of their first newborn child looking like a scrunched alien frog. I have, you know, Whitesnake.

Yes, I was in bands. I was a mediocre guitar player in that scene, draped along the Sunset Strip like ragged tinsel somewhere way, way down on the D-list of wannabe hair bands where the groupies were adorably desperate and the whiskey was plentiful and the other primary inebriant was often chopped up into fine white lines on warped full-length hallway mirrors. And lo, it was good.

My friends and bandmates were, almost without fail, funny and silly and sweet and absolutely, religiously fanatical about the music, and everyone smoked Marlboros and no one knew of a universe other than hook-heavy glam rock because no other world existed. It was like a cult, except everyone wanted to be God. And no one had any money. And your ticket to heaven was a record deal with Atlantic.

Maybe your '80s was different. Maybe you were all about the Europop and the synthesizers and the lace, the Cure and Duran Duran and a slutty "virgin" Madonna, in which case I would never have known you and maybe would've glimpsed you walking down the street and given you a quick sidelong look of jaded pity, sorry that you didn't know or understand the true soul-altering power of, say, Van Halen's "Eruption." You poor thing.

Chances are also very good you have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. Maybe your '80s had nothing to do with any of this sort of delightful debauchery and you were from a different era entirely, a different cult, a different church. It does not matter. I am sure you have your personal chunk of secret time, hiding there in your closet like a glittery patchwork sweater.

I'm guessing you have your own stack of old photos, your old memories with you and the hair, or the ex-wife, or the car or the dog or the baggy multi-pocket jeans and the look of complete universal bafflement as you sit on your nappy green couch from your first apartment that looks like something you dragged in from the street, because, well, that's exactly what it was.

Hell, maybe you're still living in that time, right now. In which case, I think I've seen you, up there on Haight Street, with your skateboard and your TV on the Radio T-shirt and your angst and your nervous sneer. I feel you, dude. Then again, odds are spectacularly good that you aren't reading this column anyway. Or any column. Because reading is for idiots and yuppies. With the notable exception, of course, of text messaging. And maybe Pitchfork. I know.

Here is my advice: Take a picture. Of yourself. Of your crew. Do it now. Do it repeatedly. Bury a large pile of these photos on a hard drive somewhere and lock that drive in your closet and resurrect them somewhere around 2027. Prepare to laugh, wince, sigh heavily through the pain. Have wine ready. A lot of wine.

Because sure enough, it was in the process of sorting and sifting and scanning these adorable and frightening memories into my MacBook that something odd happened. I began to fall into a daze. I began to leave my body. I would be staring at, say, a faded shot of my grungy little apartment on De Longpre just off Wilcox and I would see a tiny TV and a cheap stereo and the half-naked poster of some fantastically callipygian porn star and not a single thing even resembling a computer. (Wait, what? No computers? No cell phones? No cable TV? What was this, 1955? That is so weird.)

And the feeling would come. Disjointed, surreal, a little queasy. It came again as I spent a few hours creating a big iPod party mix of '80s rocker anthems, Judas Priest and AC/DC and Bon Jovi, Scorpions and Leppard and the Crüe with extra umlauts all around. I was, I realized, somehow reliving a bit of that life, somehow bringing hunks of that crazy, hazy, awkward energy back into my body like some sort of winking toxic ghost, and it totally warped my personal space-time continuum and it messed with my head and has resulted in the strangeness of this very column.

Then again, maybe it's all just a bit mandatory, the looking back, the snapshots of time and hair and strangely lucid moments. Maybe the adage is profoundly true: The only way out is through, and if you don't reconnect every once in a while with where you've been, you can never really get a grip on where the hell you're going. And this is all doubly true if the soundtrack for such a karmically deranged process has the words "rock you like a hurricane" and/or "you give love a bad name" anywhere in the lyrics. You think?

I have a friend who believes we desperately need to resurrect the hair-metal era, for it is only through the ragged glory of deafening power chords and glamorous pouts and happy sing-along anthems about sex and cars and angst and the redemptive power of rock 'n' roll that we can once again save the world from itself, and it sure as hell ain't gonna come from the likes of Fall Out Boy or the Fray or (shudder) Nickelback.

I have another friend who believes it is absolutely mandatory to, every once in a while, perform a heartfelt and significant purge. To sort through all old photos or journals or memories and simply throw heaps of them away with a smile and a prayer, thus severing any unwanted cords to the past, connections that may be overly defining you and holding you back and keeping you in certain hairy mind-sets, all as a way of making room for the new.

Me, I think it's a little bit of both. Reminisce in small but grinning doses, purge in big sweeping karmic blasts, have plenty of good wine on hand to make it all go smoothly and, every once in a while, be sure to blast "Eruption" from the rooftops because, man, that Eddie Van Halen dude sure had some great hair. You know?
Mark Morford columns with inset links to related material can be found at sfgate.com/columnists/morford.

Mark Morford's column appears Wednesdays and Fridays in Datebook and on sfgate.com. E-mail him at mmorford@sfgate.com.


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Topic - Indulging memories of bad hair and righteous power chords - LWR 18:35:13 01/19/07 (15)


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