Your front-row seat to my nervous breakdown
As anyone who has spent more than 60 seconds in my presence can tell you, I have several yarns I like to spin about exciting moments I have had with the members of Van Halen. The man standing between my wife and me in the photo above is Kevin Dugan, a good friend to whom I owe a great deal of credit for quite a few of those experiences—the latest of which took place last week, and buried the needle deep into the red on the “OMFG-That-Was-So-Cool!”-ometer.
On the first day of the first class of my freshman year in college, my College Writing 101 professor instructed us to go home that weekend and write a paper about the person whom we would most like to meet if given the chance.
And I could have bullshitted him. I could have written about wanting to meet JFK or Martin Luther King Jr. or some other revered, sociopolitical icon … but I wasn’t an 18-year-old freshman just out of high school; I was a 22-year-old freshman who had recently spent nearly four years in the Army, and my inclination to sling bullshit in order to impress a college professor was, by that point, quite nonexistent. And as I looked down at the blank notebook in front of me that weekend, I saw stretching out before me four long years of higher education … and I knew that the only way I was going to make it to the finish line was to figure out how to marry my own personal interests to my academic pursuits.
So I wrote the “I want to meet Eddie Van Halen” paper.
When last we spoke, I was about to depart for a supposed “secret” Beastie Boys concert. I’m making those little air-quote thingies with my fingers around the word “secret” because, when I showed up outside the venue about an hour and 15 minutes before the gate opened, the line already stretched around the block.
(If you need the visual, and feel like clicking “Next” 21 times, check out photo 22 of 59 in this photo gallery.)
Said the Austin American-Statesman newspaper:
The biggest surprise acts, such as the Beastie Boys at Stubb’s on Thursday, were swarmed by badge-danglers and wristband-wearers.
Well, kids, if being a badge-dangler is wrong, then I don’t wanna be right, for ’twas my dangling badge that got the K-I-D into that swarmed Beasties gig, whereupon my badge-dangling was surpassed only by my rump-shaking.
Every year, my co-workers and I mosey on down to Austin, Texas, for the annual South by Southwest music conference—or SXSW, as it is known to we the hip.
See the guy in the middle up there with the big guns and the buzz cut? That’s Trent Reznor, the mastermind behind the industrial-rock juggernaut known as Nine Inch Nails.
I am quite fond of Mr. Reznor and his music. (This is what we in the writing business refer to as “an understatement.”)
Eleven months ago, I installed WordPress on my server. I posted a dozen or so entries using the default Kubrick theme (some of which I’ll probably migrate over to this new set-up). Then I decided to create my own theme. It only took me the better part of a full year to finally get it online.
I was determined to get the site up and running before the end of today. I made it—with about an hour to spare, even. Figured I’d start 2006 on the right foot.
This place is currently held together with spit, chewing gum and some of the ugliest CSS and XHTML you’ve ever seen (don’t even bother checking to see if it validates; it so doesn’t) … but I’m launching it anyway. I’ll clean up the behind-the-scenes stuff during the days and weeks ahead. Meanwhile, though, it’s high time I start writing. After all, that’s the main reason I built this damn place.
Photo by Jon Zal
Originally published on April 23, 2002 at SoundSpike.com
In addition to being the singer, bassist and marketer extraordinaire for rock juggernaut KISS, Gene Simmons is also a self-proclaimed egomaniac.
Originally published on January 25, 2002 at Ticketmaster’s LiveDaily.com
Billy Joel and Elton John’s current Face to Face tour features a spectacular light show, video screens, and two talented backing bands … all of which were completely overshadowed Thursday night (1/24) by two chubby, balding, middle-aged guys who know how to play the hell out of a piano and whose voices are as powerful as ever.