Here’s another story from the Enigma Files, about the mysterious studio owner I knew in my late teens and early twenties.

Not long after the shooting incident,  a room opened up in the basement of the biggest music store in town, and Enigma jumped at the chance to rent it.  When they were negotiating the terms of the rental, the store’s owner told him that if any kind of disaster affected the store, Enigma would ‘totally be covered’ by the store’s insurance policy.  Enigma asked a few times if he could get that in writing, but the owner always waved his hand dismissively and told him, “Yeah, yeah. . .some other time.”   Enigma thought that was fine; what was the likelihood that anything would happen?  They could always figure it out some other time.  He would occasionally remind Owner about their deal, and Owner would always postpone.  I was there during a couple of those conversations, and I remember them well.  I knew Owner a bit, by association, and I had a friend or two who worked in the store.

Enigma had his studio in the basement for two or three years.  It was mostly electronic, which is to say that it was computer-based rather than tape-machine based.  That’s the norm these days, but in 1991, it was pretty rare.   He had a Mac Classic computer with a synthesizer or three connected to it, and that was how the majority of his projects were started.  If he needed to record drums or anything really big, he’d worked out a symbiotic deal with the drum teacher who rented the room next door.   He’d pull out his tape machine and mixer and run cables through the hall.  Here’s a picture of the studio at that time.  I’m the person in the middle, wearing the weird sweater.  My drummer friend Half-A-Bee (that’s an inside joke) is on the left, and Enigma is on the right.

It was much smaller than the other place, but the location was better, and he saw an instant jump in the number of clients that called on him.  That meant that he also called me more often to play on songs.  By then, my band had essentially broken up, but I had a bunch of songs of my own that I’d been working on, and I banked all the time I’d earned from working on all those other peoples’ sessions into my own blocks of studio time.

One thing about recording studios is that they usually have multiple projects going on simultaneously.  Large studios will sometimes be booked by record companies for weeks or months at a time, but most people these days are financing their projects themselves.   My current studio setup (otherwise known as my living room) puts Enigma’s to shame, and I can spend as long as I like working on songs, for only the price of the equipment.  Back in 1991, however, even the ancient Mac in the picture would have cost a couple thousand dollars.  It was all pretty state-of-the-art back then, and Enigma had lots of people working with him.

My ‘day’ job at the time was the night clerk at a video store.  That was one of my favorite jobs, and I worked there for quite a while.  One afternoon, my co-workers and I heard an unusual number of fire and police sirens racing across town.  We looked out the window and saw a huge plume of smoke rising from the direction of downtown.  We asked the customers as they entered the store if they knew what had happened, and someone was finally able to tell us that the music store was on fire.  My blood turned to ice, and I grabbed the phone to warn Enigma, and to tell him to get over there.  He didn’t answer, but he got my message (he told me later) and raced downtown to hopefully salvage whatever he could.

As afternoon turned to evening, the fire raged at the limits of control, and it took the firefighters until almost dawn to extinguish it.  As soon as the surrounding roads were open, my friend and I drove downtown to survey the situation, and the smoldering remains of the building were pretty terrifying.  Enigma’s studio didn’t burn, but it was buried was under fifteen feet of sludgy water and charred debris.

Remembering their verbal agreement, Enigma tried desperately to contact the building’s owner, who was unreachable for days.  Once the water had subsided a bit, the police allowed Enigma to go to the basement and retrieve what he could.  Most of his stuff, including his tape machine, was completely destroyed, but he was actually able to salvage some of his gear.   He wrapped everything in black garbage bags and carted it to his mom’s living room, where it sat for months while he completely disassembled every piece and cleaned it up.  The computer actually came back to life, eventually, and the mixing board only needed some slight repairs.  Amazing.

After a week or two (if memory serves), he was finally able to track down the owner of the building, who had managed to conveniently forget about their permanently postponed contract.  I told Enigma that I remembered those conversations, and that I’d be happy to testify in court if it came to that.  The owner continued to balk, so Enigma had no other choice but to sue him.  He invited those of us with studio projects in the works to join in the lawsuit, so that we could also be compensated for the amount of time and money that we’d lost.  Some people only lost a song or two, but some of us lost a significant amount of music in that fire.  I had accumulated about three thousand dollars’ worth of studio time, and there was a hip-hop guy whose album was completely finished and ready to be sent to duplication.  Of all the studio’s clients, his loss was by far the most devastating.

The details of the case were these:  the owner had let an employee and some friends dink around in the store after it had closed for the day, and that employee had been smoking a cigarette while he was in there.  I don’t remember if the guy dropped the cigarette, or if he left it in a garbage can and thought he’d extinguished it, but the cigarette was thought to be the cause of the fire.  The police suspected arson, which seemed especially credible since the store owner skipped off to Florida with his two-million-dollar insurance settlement, and couldn’t be tracked down for the next few years, by which time our case had been dropped since the lawyers couldn’t find Owner.  I will go to my grave believing it was arson, because if it HAD been an accident, Owner would’ve been outraged (which he was not), and much more willing to fulfill his responsibilities to his various tenants.  As far as I’m concerned, foul play is the only thing that explains his bizarre behavior, and his unwillingness to deal with those of us who were left high and dry.  Not to mention the fact that the owner was able to salvage a great deal of his inventory and have a huge ‘fire sale’ a month or two later, so he recouped a sizable amount of that money as well.  Yakima’s online newspaper archive only goes back as far as 1997, unfortunately, so I wasn’t able to find this story, but I would really love to find out how they reported the story.

One funny thing about this story was our lawyer’s name.  It was the kind of name that only appears on cheesy TV shows.  I can’t tell you what it really was, since she’s still around and practicing law, but I can tell you that her name sounded like “Money Law.”   Isn’t that cute?

Every once in a while, I search for Enigma online, and I find him.  Sometimes I think it’d be nice to reconnect, but then I remember some of the weirdness, and I lose any motivation to contact him.  Best to let sleeping dogs lie, I’d say, in this particular case.

My last entry was about Enigma, the studio owner I knew back in my Yakima days, and I promised you a couple more stories about him. Well, now is as good a time as any, and I’m ready for one if you are.

After I’d spent a few nights recording my own songs, and Enigma saw that I could play a number of instruments, he started calling me in to play keyboards or guitar on sessions for other people. One of the people was a singer-songwriter who A) fancied himself the next Otis Redding (despite the fact that he was white and had difficulty singing in tune), and B) coincidentally enough, had the same name as my childhood optometrist. We also worked with a group of four guys who were modeling themselves after the New Kids on the Block. Ever the budding entrepreneur, Enigma had the brilliant idea of introducing WhiteOtis to the NewKids and creating a ‘supergroup’ of sorts, which he himself would manage. I was called in to help them write some songs. This relationship proved to be ill-fated, and everybody went back to what they’d been doing separately. Otis continued working on his solo project, “Do It,” which would be the first session work on my musical resumé.

One night, we were working on one of the songs for that album—I should really call it a ‘tape’, since calling it an ‘album’ makes it sound much more glamorous and legitimate than it was—and I invited a couple of my bandmates to the studio so that they could hear what Enigma and I were up to. We arrived early, and hung out with Enigma in the studio’s front office for ten minutes or so, until Otis arrived and we all made our way to the main room of the studio. Not more than a few minutes after we had moved to the main room, we heard a bunch of loud sounds that we assumed were firecrackers until we heard things hit the window and saw the curtains moving. It was then we realized were being shot at, and we ducked behind whatever cover we could find. Otis and I hid underneath the studio’s large mixing console, which was sitting on top of a sturdy wooden table. My two bandmates hid around the corner by the bathroom, while Enigma grabbed his shotgun and climbed up a ladder and into the crawlspace above the ceiling. He intended to climb up to the roof and survey the situation from there.

Otis and I were nearest to the phone, so I suggested that we call Nine-One-One and report what was going on. He lifted the receiver and made the call. “We’re being shot at,” he said tersely.

“Okay, where are you located?” the operator asked.

“Uhh. . .we’re kind of. . .on Lincoln and 26th. No, 24th—” He lowered the handset and whispered to me, What’s the address here?

I happened to know it (it was on 20th), so I whispered it to him. He relayed it to the operator, who said that the police were on their way. We thanked her and hung up.

After that, the shooting stopped, but the five of us stayed crouched and hidden until we saw the flashing red and blue lights of the police cars a few minutes later. Enigma had come down from the roof and joined us in the studio again, although he returned by way of a different route than he exited. He jumped down from the ceiling with his shotgun slung over his shoulder, and he tucked it behind his back as he peeked through the front door’s mail slot. “You might want to put that away,” I told him, gesturing at the huge gun.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, and returned it to its hiding place somewhere. While he was putting it away, the police called for us to come out with our hands up, and we walked single-file toward the door. I was the first one outside, and I was faced with the horrifying sight of four handguns pointed at me. I was told to put my hands on the car, and I did so immediately. My bandmates were the next in line, and they followed suit. Enigma was behind them, and he sauntered over to the car next to us. Otis was the last one out of the building, and he was just as calm and cool as can be. “It’s okay,” he said to the police, “we called YOU.” The guns were lowered and the officers came over to talk with us.

We told them what happened, to the best of our ability, and there were lots of rounds of ammunition strewn about on the ground outside the studio, which the police said were from a .22-caliber rifle. We showed them the holes in the windows and curtains, and even found a few rounds embedded in the desk and shelves near where we’d all been standing only minutes before. It was pretty scary, and I’ll never forget that experience. Here’s a picture of the building today, thanks to GoogleMaps.

I love that there’s a derelict shopping cart in the photo. I could have easily cropped it out or chosen a different angle, but why? The cart seems so apropos, somehow. Also, there used to be a row of tall, beautiful trees across the street from that building, but they’ve been cut down in favor of. . .a lawn for whatever business is located there now.

Anyway. That’s neither here nor there.

The full story came out as Otis was telling his story to the police. Otis and Enigma had been hanging out at the studio earlier that afternoon, when a group of four or five young guys came to the door and said, “Hey, we’re looking for [Otis Redding].”

“Yeah, that’s me,” he replied.

“Oh, uhhhh—” they stammered, “we were looking for the [Otis Redding] who went to Hick High School.” [For the record, I had recently graduated from Hick High School, and there was no one named Otis Redding.]

“No, I go to Redneck High School.”

“Okay, sorry to bother you guys.” They walked to their car and drove off.

Otis stood in the doorway and watched them leave, then turned back and said to Enigma, “That was kinda weird. Don’tcha think that was weird?”

Enigma agreed that it WAS weird, and Otis decided to go out and get some food (and, I suspect, to try and hunt down the group of guys), which is around the time that my bandmates and I arrived, unaware of that conversation. In retrospect, it seems that Otis had stolen a girl from one or more of the guys in question, and they were out for revenge. They knew he was a singer, and that he was working with Enigma, so he was easy enough to track down. The rest of us would have been collateral damage.

That was one of the strangest moments of my life. It was certainly the only time I’ve been shot at, as far as I know.

The shooting incident also scared Enigma into moving his studio to a more secure location, and when the biggest music store in town had an open room in its basement, Enigma jumped at the chance to move in. That’s the starting point for the story I’ll tell you next time on. . .The Enigma Files. Or something like that.

To be continued.

When I was about eighteen years old, my friends and I had been writing songs for our first band.  We had about fifteen or twenty songs in various degrees of completion, and we’d been recording demo versions of them on a four-track cassette recorder.  There were lots of other short song ideas, some of which were done with our tongues firmly planted in our cheeks, but we definitely learned a lot about the recording process, and how to make instruments work together in a song.  In retrospect, it’s easy to see that that’s where I learned many of the musical skills I still use today.

What had started as a two-person group had morphed by then into a five-person group, and we felt it was time to make some professional recordings that reflected and showcased our new members.  I went to the phone book, called a studio that seemed promising, and booked some time.  The studio owner and I would turn out to be pretty good friends, but he was also one of the most enigmatic people I’ve ever known.  He has used multiple versions of his name throughout the years of his professional careers, so in the interest of anonymity, I’ll go ahead and refer to him as Enigma from now on.  He was always a jack-of-all-trades, and he dabbled in music, photography, and even acting.  In fact, here’s a recent profile picture from that online movie database.  I suspect this was taken on a film set, but that’s how he used to dress all the time, right down to the bandana.

He owned a small recording studio in CityOfAngels and had recently relocated to Yakima to take care of his aging mother, as well as to live on the cheap for a while.  I don’t mean to paint him in a negative light, or give you the impression that he was in any way a bad guy, because I don’t think he was.  He was just very mysterious, that’s all, and though we knew each other for years, I never felt like I knew him very well.  He seemed to have lots of secrets, and he liked to live off the grid.  He had inherited a bit of money, so he bought a bright red Toyota four-wheel-drive pickup, loaded his camping gear and his two white Siberian huskies, and floated between Yakima, AngelCity, EmeraldCity, and NearestLargeCanadianCity.  He kept his lifestyle simple, so that he could pack up and leave at a moment’s notice.  And he would, too.  He would disappear for months on end, and none of his friends would hear from him.  He’d turn up like nothing happened, with no explanation for his time away.  Everyone suspected that drugs were involved somehow, but he claimed not to use or sell them.  In fact, he was a very health-conscious guy and a long-time vegetarian, well before vegetarianism was de rigeur. I’m not saying that vegetarians aren’t capable of doing drugs—they certainly are—but I spent enough time with him, at all kinds of crazy hours, that I like to think I would’ve noticed anything out of the ordinary.  Who knows.

He met one of my college friends, a beautiful blonde girl, at a party one night, and asked her to be his ‘assistant’, since she already had a boyfriend.  She reluctantly agreed, and she answered phones and kept his books and all sorts of other thankless tasks, while constantly rebuffing his romantic advances.   After a few weeks of working for him, she asked me, “What does he do?  For money?  I don’t do much all day, and he hardly gets any business.  I don’t get it.  Does he sell drugs or something?”

“I don’t think so,” I replied, “but nobody really knows for sure.  He’s so hush-hush about his life.”

She gave me a conspiratorial smirk.  “I think I’m gonna try and find out.  You know, I’ll ‘get close’ to him and stuff.”   I thought the idea was hilariously diabolical, and told her so.  It just might work.  I told her I would do my part to pry information from him too, to the extent that I could, and we both pledged to share whatever we found out about him with the other person.  We both came up empty-handed, and he disappeared from town again.

Enigma was a bit of a conspiracy theorist, and a self-professed ‘huge fan’ of Area 51 and UFO’s and all that.  In fact, in the outskirts of Yakima is a top-secret NSA listening station which can be briefly glimpsed from the freeway up in the hills just north of town.

(photo taken from Creative Suggestions’ Flickr page)

Like I said, it’s a top-secret installation (one of many in the Yakima area), and if you try to drive out there, you’ll be stopped by soldiers in jeeps, with guns.  Enigma called them on the phone more than once, and when they asked who he was and why he was calling, he was shockingly candid.  “Well, I’m a big fan of secret government operations, and I’m an American taxpayer and a concerned citizen, so I was just hoping to find out what you guys are doing out there.”  As if they’re gonna roll out the red carpet for him and invite him on an all-access tour.  “No comment,” he was told, and the connection was terminated.  So he tried driving out there, with similar treatment from the soldiers in the jeeps.  “Turn around and go home,” they told him.

This entry is meant to provide context for the next couple of stories I’m going to tell about Enigma, each of which is fairly long in its own right, so I thought it best to break them up and give each one its due, rather than cram them both into one mammoth entry.  Besides, if I think of more stories, then adding them individually is definitely the way to go.  In order to tantalize you, I will say that one story involves an arson fire that destroyed the largest music store in town (Enigma’s second studio was located in the basement), and the other involves Enigma, my bandmates, myself, and a singer getting shot at.

To be continued.

My older niece is in fifth grade, and every time we talk about school, I feel the need to bite my tongue a bit, because fifth grade was such a rough year for me.  My teacher, Mr. P., was horrendous, and mean, which I suppose is common enough, but that was also the year in which my parents got a divorce, and we were dealing with all that crap at the same time.  School work, naturally, got pushed to the back burner occasionally, as we were shuttled back and forth between Mom’s house and Dad’s new apartment.  My teacher sent many an angry report card home with me for my mom to acknowledge and sign, but I don’t think she ever saw any of them, because I would forge her signature and dutifully bring the cards right back to school with me the next day.  While I was in Yakima a few months ago for Stepdad’s funeral, Mom gave Brother and me each a box of our childhood stuff.  My box, which I now have here in my basement, was and is crammed full of school papers, drawings, my license plate collection, and even the slightly tattered blue blanket I used to carry around when I was really young.  Sure enough, mixed in with the forgettable mountain of school papers, I found one of those forged report cards.  I find it a bit depressing that with of all the important things I wish I still had (like my cassette tapes, and my toy cars!), that piece of hilarious minutiae somehow managed to survive the intervening decades.

But Niece doesn’t have to know about any of that for quite a while, as far as I’m concerned.  I don’t want to burden her with that knowledge, or to use the influence I have over her (as the ‘cool’ uncle) to sway her in that negative direction.  I want her to have the best school experiences she can, for as long as she can.  School’s hard enough without your uncle telling you how crappy it is.  But I do think about it from time to time, and I feel like fifth grade was the first real low point in my life, and that’s when something changed in me forever.

In sixth grade, I had a teacher with the very unfortunate surname of Growcock.  On the first day of school, he would quickly tell the students, “Call me ‘Mister G’.”  Thankfully, he was one of the best, nicest and most memorable teachers I had during elementary school, which helped bring me back from the shell shock of the year before.  He was always quick with a joke, but we knew to take him seriously also.  Each year, he would take the entire sixth-grade class to see a Harlem Globetrotters game in the nearby college town of Ellensburg, which was a tradition that all the younger kids looked forward to.

On Valentines’ Day that year, all of us kids made cards for each other, boys and girls alike.  That was the last year we did that before we all hit puberty the following year, which meant that valentines were out of the question.  One of those valentine folders survived in my childhood box, too, but I’m not sure if it’s the one from fifth or sixth grade.  What I do remember about that day was the folders we all made.  We cut out construction paper and drew a bunch of designs all over it – usually hearts or poems or whatever – and then we taped them to the side of our desks so that people could come around and place cards into them.  One kid, M. Reynolds, wrote a poem on his folder that quoted a popular commercial of the day:  “Reynolds Wrap:  the best wrap around.”  M.’s writing skills were a bit lacking, however, so he misspelled the word ‘wrap’, which meant that his Valentines’ poem was proudly displayed on the side of his desk, in huge bold letters, for all to see.

“REYNOLDS RAPE, THE BEST RAPE AROUND.”

My desk was right next to M.’s, which meant that I got to see that gem in progress before anyone else did, and I knew that it might get him in trouble if anybody else saw it.  I wasn’t necessarily a friend of M.’s, but I felt that I should mention it to Mr. G., and somehow stick up for M. at the same time.  When the bell rang and everyone else, including M., ran outside for recess, I walked up to Mr. G.’s desk and told him I had something to show him.  “I’m sure this is a total accident, since M. isn’t very good at spelling, but I thought you should see this, cause it’s funny.  I don’t want him to get in trouble or anything, though.”  We had a good laugh, and he told me he’d take care of it.  When the class came back inside from recess, M. had crossed out every instance of ‘rape’ and replaced it with the correct word.

Incidentally, I’m sure Mr. G. knew how lucky he was that he taught younger kids, because with the last name Growcock, teaching any older age group would provide decades of ridicule for the poor guy.   Maybe he consciously chose to teach lower grade levels for that very reason.  One of my current friends, who was in Mr. G.’s class at the same time I was, recently joked, “Man, I’d be changing that shit to Smith.“  I couldn’t agree more.  I did a quick search for Mr. G. online, and it seems that he’s still alive and living in central Washington state, although he’s almost eighty years old now.  I hope he continued to enjoy teaching, and I hope he’s had a good life.  I probably owe my sanity that year to him, although I promptly lost it again the next year, as soon as I entered junior high.

Like most kids, I spent the first decade or so of my musical life listening to my parents’ record collection, which consisted almost entirely of classical music, with the barest minimum of rock (The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Mamas and the Papas, etc.) thrown in for good measure.  My dad’s rare ventures into so-called rock included easy listening stuff like the Carpenters, which made my brother and me cringe.  By the time I was about twelve years old, I finally discovered that I could have a radio in my room, and that radios had stations that could be changed.  I quickly found out about NPR, because they played a radio version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I still think is one of the funniest and most brilliant books ever written.  I also found out about heavy metal, which was popular at the time, and which changed my life forever.

There was a late-night (ten o’clock is late-night when you’re thirteen years old) show called Metal Shop, which introduced me to a whole new style of music that I would call my own for the next few years.  The show has a newish online presence, albeit without the original host, but it will give you an idea of the kind of bands they played.  The ones I that knocked me out early on were Dokken, Ratt and Twisted Sister, but I eagerly devoured most of what the show offered up each week.  My brother dutifully followed suit, and before long, we were listening to all the metal masters of the day.  I got my first electric guitar a month after my fifteenth birthday, and this is about all anyone saw of me for the next two years.

I’m happy to have a scanner, finally, so that pictures like the one of my brother in Kiss makeup can finally see the light of day.  I’m sure he’ll be thrilled about this.

I’m sharing it here because A) it’s priceless and I love it, and B) he’s standing in my doorway, so you can see that I had corkboard panels covering my wall, and the entire thing was covered with pictures cut out from magazines like Hit Parader and Circus.  From the top down, they are pictures of Aerosmith, Ratt, the Scorpions, Eddie Van Halen, and Kiss.  You’re welcome.

All of this presented a problem for our mom, who was becoming more and more conservative as the years progressed.  She was worried about the state of our souls, and she would give us books by Christian authors like Bob Larson, who was most famous for his theories about the supposed practice of the ‘backward masking’ of hidden Satanic messages that only appeared in songs when the songs were played in reverse.

Bob is still around and doing his thing, and his focus these days seems to have shifted from the evils of rock music to the exorcism of demons, but back in the day he would spend all his time decrying heavy metal and playing song after song while he did so.  He would compare the supposed innocence of the regular version of a song, but as soon as he played the record backwards, its subversive and insidious ‘real’ meaning was revealed.  One of the most famous examples was “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen, which said, upon reversal, “Decide to smoke marijuana.”  Or DID it?

The best times on the show were when he would open up the phone lines and take callers.  He would argue passionately with the ones who found his claims ridiculous, and he would ‘save’ the ones who felt they needed to repent, right there on the air.  It made for hilarious and riveting radio.   When a caller would say, “But, Bob, [insert famous musician's name here] wears a cross all the time,” Bob would reply, “I bet he doesn’t even know what that cross means.”  Our favorite quotation of his was about the leather-and-studs clothing that Judas Priest introduced, which was quickly adopted by a lot of the other bands.  Bob made it very clear that “leather and studs are symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community.”

Who’d have thought at the time that Rob Halford of Judas Priest (in the picture above) would, in fact, come out of the closet and announce his homosexuality a decade or so later?  Who’d have thought that he spent much of his free time in gay S&M clubs, and that he would fashion the entire look for his band after the style of clothing that he’d seen and worn in the clubs?  The mind boggles.  All I can say is, when my brother and I were young, ideas like ‘the symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community’ would never have crossed our minds if it wasn’t for Bob Larson.  We liked the music enough that we didn’t really care what people looked like, with the possible exception of Vinnie Vincent, who looked even more feminine than most of the other glam rockers at the time, which put him up against some serious competition.

At some point, I’ll have to write a separate entry about Vinnie Vincent, because his is a very interesting story, and a bit of a rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags one, too.  That’s neither here nor there, at least for the purposes of this story.

It was never our intention to emulate the rock-and-roll lifestyle; we were mostly well-adjusted kids who just wanted to listen to the music.  One day, however, our mom decided that she’d had enough.  She marched into my brother’s room, where he had a large poster of Poison on his wall.  The bass player, Bobby Dall (I didn’t even have to look that up!), had a cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth.

“That’s disgusting,” my mom sneered.  “Take it down.”

“What?” my brother asked.  “No way!”

“Yes,” she said firmly.  “Look at that; he’s got a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.”

“So?  You think I’m gonna start smoking just because he does?”

“Well. . .maybe.”

“Oh yeah, right.  Why do I have to take this down?  Come here.”  He ran into my room and pointed at a huge poster of Yngwie Malmsteen dressed in black, wearing a huge cross around his neck.  “Look,” he continued, sarcasm dripping from his tongue, throwing Bob Larson’s quotations back into Mom’s face.  “He’s wearing a cross. . .I bet he doesn’t know what that means! And all these guys are wearing leather and studs, which are the symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community!”

At that, Mom came bursting into my room, saying, “WHERE?”

I collapsed into laughter, and my brother was still consumed with rage, but after a few seconds he started to laugh too.  He wasn’t about to take down that poster, though, especially since I had an entire wall devoted to all the same people, and I certainly wasn’t going to take anything down.   Mom stood and stared at my wall, seemingly for the first time, and she didn’t like it one bit.  The symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community were everywhere, and so were the symbols of hedonism and satanism.

“I want this garbage taken down,” she said.

“No.  Why is this such a big deal all of a sudden?  These pictures have been up here for two years.”

“Well, take them down now.”

“No.  I like them.”

My brother and I won that particular argument.  I suspect that Mom realized it was a phase we were going through, and that we’d grow out of it soon enough.  Or maybe she just gave in.  Either way, we won, and the posters stayed up until we moved into our new house a couple of years later, by which time they had been replaced by world maps and posters of the Beatles.

In my experience, if you tell somebody they can’t have something, it only makes them want it more.  When I was in college, there was a pathetic demonstration of some sort (I don’t even remember what the issue was) that involved people waving signs that warned other people not to burn the flag.   One of my friends said, dryly, “I never wanted to burn a flag until they told me I couldn’t.”  Also, I worked at a record store during the time that 2 Live Krew’s Nasty As They Wanna Be came out.  That turd of an album sat untouched on the shelf for months at a time, and we couldn’t pay people to take a copy of it.  As soon as it got banned, however, we couldn’t order copies of it fast enough.  People who didn’t even like rap were buying them just to see what the fuss was about.

The point of all this, to the extent that there is one, is that kids turn out fine most of the time, and the music they listen to is the least of their problems.   Pick your battles, parents, and stay involved with their lives, but be careful not to make mountains out of molehills.  If you do, you’ll only make the kids more likely to rebel, which will exacerbate the issues you were trying to eliminate in the first place.

By way of a denouement, here’s a classic Bloom County cartoon I had on my wall back then, from when Apple introduced the first Macintosh computers.  I figured it would tie in nicely with this particular discussion.