RoundEye

EDIT - 920 Words

I’m just throwing this up for fun, just in case anybody likes a “back in the day” story.

No critique really needed, unless you feel compelled to do so.




Oh Bondage, Up Yours!

I was only about thirteen when an older friend of mine returned back home from England, his suitcase swollen with souvenirs from the trip. He dug into that stash of his and pulled out a bunch of 45’s. “it’s the happening shit right now over there!” he said. And off to the record player we went.

As a young kid growing up in New Orleans before the Internet and MTV, I had no clue what-so-ever of what I was about to get myself into. So we start cueing up the 45’s. By design they were a little newer then the ones I was used to. They would just slide right on down the spindle of the record player, those little plastic pieces that adapted the large round hole in the center wasn’t needed.

We spent the rest of the afternoon listening to a new sound that I had never heard before, this shit was strange. And to say it was strange means a lot, coming from a kid whose parents listened to Led Zepplin and went to Alice Cooper concerts.

But being the odd little fucker that I was then and still am today, I liked it. It sounded somewhat like the Jazz I grew up listening to on Bourbon Street. Except these guys were plugged in and electrified. A whole lot louder and in your damn face about it all too. But it still reminded me of Jazz in the way that everybody was playing to the beat of a different drummer in their own heads, even the drummer.

But that’s where the similarity ends, these clowns were dressed up like a group of sadomasochistic Bozos. White faces contrasted by black makeup and voices that only a person who likes fingernails screeched against chalkboards could love. But I liked it anyway, loud and in your face style of music that I’ve not heard around these parts before. It was like the music demanded that I listen to it, and I better damn well enjoy it too. Or these clowns were going to come over, kick through the window and stomp my ass into the ground. So I listened, not only to the music, to them too and enjoyed myself.

In that mass of vinyl there was one that I really liked, a nice bright orange label and a woman with a voice that later had been described by many as “powerful enough to drill holes through sheet metal". A woman tagged with the name of Poly Styrene in a band called X-Ray Spex, screeching out the tune “Oh bondage, up yours!”. As you may have already guessed by now, it was the latest little fad called “Punk Rock”, and it was around 1978.

In a world devoid of MTV and the Internet, that’s how music got to influence your life. One tiny piece of vinyl that traveled across a vast ocean stuffed into somebody’s luggage. Though a little wheeling and dealing, I went home with that record. I must have played it for a hundred friends throughout my early years, only for me to be looked at in a shock-like state as if I was from the plant Pluto when I said that I liked it.

Never to be one into fashion statements, I didn’t really dress the part. I just couldn’t bring myself to conform to a certain style. It’s a little rough to convince your mom that you want a purple spiked mohawk anyway. But I was a Punk in practice, just not in style. Over time you tend to gravitate to like-minded individuals, and years later that’s how I met my friend Arthur. Well over six foot tall and the strongest man that I ever personally met in my life. He’s the one that had the monsterly large spiked mohawk and dressed the part too. He also had the numbers “666” tattooed on the side of his head, stating “who gives a flying fuck, my hair will cover it when I get older!”. I wonder if he secretly regrets that statement now that we are both in our forties and he’s bald as a bowling ball.

Ah, the good ol’ days of seeing bands like Black Flag and The Ramones in their infancy. I actually broke my left arm the day before my mother’s birthday slamming at a punk concert. Much money was spent at shows and I went home many of time with blood stained clothes, mine as well as the blood of others. I have no regrets though, not even at the supposedly “more mature” age that I am now. If I still had the ability to jump into to the pit now, that I had then, you could bet your ass that I would be in there slamming some heads down.

If I had any regrets, it would be in knowing that bitch Katrina. She has taken two things from me that can’t be replaced. One would be that little scratched up record titled “Oh bondage, up yours!”, smashed to pieces by a huge Pecan tree that destroyed my garage and just about every other item that I saved from my younger days.

And two would be my friend Arthur. Whose house was inundated by flood water over the roof, causing him to move to parts unknown, never to be seen or heard from again.

Oh well, at least the catastrophes of life haven’t taken away the memories of it all from me. At least, not yet.

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