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SInce that little bit of fiction is unable to be viewed, I offer instead, the following essay. The format might be a bit screwy because I'm copy/pasting. Deal with it. Enjoy.


The Future Gods of Rock

And nothing really rocks
And nothing really rolls
And nothing’s ever worth the cost
“Bat Out of Hell” Meat Loaf


I’m standing at the door to the House of Blues- Las Vegas with Beth Hale, tour manager of Halestorm. This is not her first time in Las Vegas but it is her first visit with the band. Beth isn’t just the tour manager, only there to push T-shirts and CDs. She is also the mother of Lzzy and Arejay, the two original members of Halestorm.
“You were right,” she tells me. “You were easy to pick out of the crowd.”
A few minutes ago, I called her to let her know I was on my way to the venue, stuck in Las Vegas rush hour traffic. “Look for the redhead in a Fight Club T-shirt,” I told her.
I couldn’t get right back to meet the band despite my interview with Halestorm being scheduled for 4:30. The House of Blues is very strict on who goes backstage and who doesn’t. Right now, I’m a “doesn’t”. The scene from Almost Famous where the wanna-be rock journalist kid is stuck outside because the doorman doesn’t believe he is on list runs through my head. I’m looking for groupies who will let me tag along with them, just so I don’t blow this job.
“Dave, with Shinedown, should have your pass,” Beth says. “Let me know when you get it and I will take you back.”
Dave is late. I’m not the only journalist waiting for my press pass to arrive. Luckily, I already have my tickets, thanks to Halestorm’s public relations representative at Atlantic Records. I don’t have to wait at will call for my tickets but I do have to wait for my photo pass.
This whole time, while I start to sweat in anticipation, Brianna just smiles. I brought her with me because I know she loves rock music. She’s wearing a Lynard Skynard shirt and seems just happy to be there. Also, she knows who Shinedown is and I don’t.
Brianna is also only nineteen, young like the band. Bassist Josh Smith is twenty-five, closer to my own age, and sports a wild mop of hair worthy of any 1970s arena-rock group. Joe Hottinger, with his “Jesus” beard and Led Zeppelin necklace, won’t be twenty-four until after the group’s return trip to Sin City three months from now. Arejay, blonde and wearing a T-shirt featuring co-headliner Seether, is mere weeks older than Brianna. Lzzy, once Elizabeth, is barely twenty-two.
By the time Dave makes it to the venue, I’m already backstage, courtesy of HoB’s house manager. Due to the lateness, Shinedown interviews are divided by priority. My place on the totem pole of rock chroniclers merits me the drummer.
Briefly.
You can read about the show in the article I wrote. You can read how well-received Halestorm was by a crowd previously unaware of their existence. You can read about how the band members signed anything anyone handed them and how they are still nice kids, despite being of the verge of rock stardom.
What you won’t read is how Josh gave me a Heineken and Brianna a Budweiser. I know she’s only nineteen but I’m not her dad.
You will read about why Lzzy wore a fingerless leather glove that night. Two nights before she cut herself on the strings of her white Fender guitar and sprayed blood all over her Hendrix-like axe and the bald head of a security guard.
You won’t read about how raven-haired-rock-goddess sexy I think Lzzy is. How her lungs and eyes are just as appealing as her chest. You won’t read about how Brianna started crushing on Joe and his beard and how overjoyed she was when he threw her one of his guitar picks during the show.
You won’t read about how spending time with this young band from York, Pennsylvania reignited the adolescent rock and roll dreams of a small town Utah boy, trying to make in the big city.
It is in there, somewhere, but you’d have to look for it.


But the thrill we've never known
Is the thrill that'll getcha
When you get your pictureOn the cover of the Rollin' Stone
“Cover of the Rolling Stone” Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show


I won’t lie and say Wes, my mom’s third husband, never did anything good for me. As much as I’d like to say that, I can’t and still tell the truth. One of the good things about Wes was that he played air guitar. He shredded air guitar like no one I had seen before.
Actually, I had never seen anyone play air guitar at all. All the people I knew up to that point who wanted to play guitar learned how to do the real thing. But that was Wes, a balding, thirty something teenager who collected baseball cards and Rolling Stone magazine.
At first, I stole copies of Rolling Stone because there were pictures of gorgeous women on the covers and inside. There were racy ads for English Leather—my man wears English Leather or he doesn’t wear anything—with lingerie clad models and an occasional ad for “couples therapy” videotapes. Some boys find Dad’s copies of Playboy; I fantasized about female musicians.
They had Hugh Hefner. I had Jann Wenner.
Most of the copies were from the late 1980s and early’90s. Hair metal was dying out, grunge wasn’t invented yet, and Madonna was still a hussy instead of a mother.
I can’t remember all of what I read because I was still focused on the pictures. I do remember photos of the Bangles (Susanna Hoffs is still beautiful), Pat Benatar, Lita Ford, and, thanks to Rolling Stone’s diversity of age and race, Janet Jackson and Debbie Gibson.
I remember listening to The Bangles, even knew many of the lyrics to their hits. When I was ten, I knew that the girl I would someday fall in love with would be my “Eternal Flame” and want to “Walk Like an Egyptian” with me. My sister, Leslie, listened to Debbie Gibson. Debbie was cool, I guess, but I wanted to rock.
And I wasn’t the only one in the house with that desire. One day when Wes wasn’t busy trying to be a Blues Brother, I caught him strumming that air guitar to Bon Jovi. At the time, I tried not to like Bon Jovi because Wes liked them. Him and all the “cool” guys at school. Being cool was not high on my priorities. All the cool guys I knew were jerks. Why would anyone want to be a jerk?
Plus, Bon Jovi wasn’t loud enough.

And it came to pass
That rock 'n' roll was born
All across the land every rockin' band
Was blowin' up a storm
“Let There Be Rock” AC/DC


Jeremy Wright’s parents were rockers, too. One night, I was set to sleepover at Jeremy’s house. A couple nights before, the sleepover was canceled. Jeremy’s parents weren’t going to be home because they had tickets to a concert in Salt Lake City and wouldn’t be home until the next afternoon. It was January and they didn’t want to risk driving at night in the snow.
Specifically, it was January 18, 1991. For fans of AC/DC and all the haters of rock music in Utah, this was the night the Salt Palace entered a level of rock history occupied by The Rolling Stones at Altamont and The Who in Cleveland. Three fans, including one from Logan, Utah, only thirty miles from my house in Lewiston, were trampled to death.
The next Monday, AC/DC was banned at school and at Jeremy’s house, even though his own parents had been at the concert.
Guess who benefited from this tragedy?
Jeremy gave me all the copies of AC/DC music that he had. I don’t know what his parents did with the original CDs (and, according to Jeremy, vinyl!) but the tapes made from those originals came home with me. I had heard the hits on KBER 101.1, Utah’s Rock Station, but many of the other songs had never breeched my ears.
The next day, when Principal Goodey heard me singing “I’ve got big balls, he’s got big balls, she’s got big balls, but we’ve got the biggest balls of them all,” I lied and told him I made it up. Anything in order to keep my precious tapes.
From then on, any time I’ve been forced to return to Cache Valley, I crank up “Highway to Hell” without caring who else is in the car.
Of course, any early-90s burgeoning metalhead who didn’t listen to Metallica was a bigger loser than a regular metalhead. The “Black Album” was the biggest thing in the world at the time and I didn’t own any Metallica. I borrowed “…And Justice For All” from a friend I don’t remember but wasn’t impressed. Where was the bass, I wondered. (I didn’t know anything about the band, so I didn’t know it was Jason Newsted’s first album with the group. If you asked me who Cliff Burton was, or even James Hetfield, I would have tried to remember which baseball team they played for.)
Strange, isn’t it? Any other kid my age into hard rock idolized Metallica to the point of near-psychosis. Maybe it is because I came to them later that I am able to appreciate the music they’ve made since 1991. Don’t get me wrong; anything from “Master of Puppets” and before licks the sonic ass of anything after it. There are some gems on the later records, but nothing like the old days.
I missed those old days. I didn’t own a Metallica record until 1994. Now I have all of them, even “S&M”, the record they made with the San Francisco Symphony. I listen to it with my mom.



***


Some marching band keeps Its own beat in my head while we're talking
About all of the things that I long to believe
About love and the truth and what you mean to me
And the truth is baby you're all that I need
“Bed of Roses” Bon Jovi

When my family escaped—and I use that word with all of its intended meaning—from Cache Valley, we did so with a bit of spending cash. Each of us kids, me, Leslie, younger brother Deken, and youngest brother Logan, were given a special treat over the summer but Mom was looking for something we could all do together.
Sticking it in the face of three-year-gone Wes who never made it to a real concert, we went to see Bon Jovi as a family. We were going to get general seating but while we were at the SmithTix booth (SmithTix, at the time, was the largest ticket seller in the state and operated out of Smith’s grocery stores. They might still be the best place to get concert tickets but I don’t know.) we noticed that reserved seating wasn’t much more expensive than the general seating.
Imagine my family of five, Mom is barely thirty-five and Logan is only seven, tenth row at Bon Jovi, banging our heads together, having a better night as a cohesive unit than any church could think of. We rocked as a family. We each left with a tour T-shirt—“You can’t leave without knowing you were there,” Mom said—and some with sore necks or headaches.
The next day was the first day of the new school year at a new school for me. My siblings had moved back to Payson, our first and best home, in the spring so they were already acquainted with their schools.
I remember the first words I heard from another student at Payson High School. “Hey, everyone, look. It’s Ron Jon Bovi!” While I thought my worst fears were coming true, it turned out different. The speaker was a senior and quite a popular one at that. If he said someone was cool, then that person was cool.
For the first time in my life, I was cool. And I owed it all to Rock.
Wes, with his wicked air guitar, was never this cool.
There is a picture of me in the 1995-96 Payson High School yearbook, almost at the exact center. It covers the top half of two pages. I’m smiling because I’m a sophomore and a senior girl has her arm around me. The caption reads, “Alice Webber seems to be one of Ron Jon Bovi’s biggest fans.”
I am a Rock God!


I'm so happy 'cause today
I've found my friends ...
They're in my head
I'm so ugly, but that's okay, ‘cause so are you ...
“Lithium” Nirvana


Grunge took over and life went back to shit. No more Rolling Stone to read, which I learned to live with, and not as close a family, which was harder to deal with. Mom married again, her fourth marriage, and moved to Washington. At this time, I was exploring a different kind of stardom, that of high school theater. I got over that, dropped out of high school, and basically became a loser. I didn’t have anything. I didn’t even own a stereo.
The girl I was in love with, Jenny, was a dedicated follower of Nirvana, even after Kurt Cobain’s death. I didn’t want to listen to new music. I wanted Led Zeppelin and the Doors. I wanted to marry her. I tried to be a normal guy for her, ditching my brief affair with “goth” and bullshitting my way into a real job at a warehouse.
Everyday, I woke up at 4:30 a.m. just to make it to work at 6:30. I made a decent wage, especially for a drop out and had a good apartment.
I didn’t have anything I wanted.
Jenny went to college at Southern Utah University on a theater scholarship. There she met her soon-to-be husband.
The day they were married, I blasted the Velvet Underground and the Sex Pistols on the small K-Mart stereo I eventually bought. “Sweet Jane” was one of our songs. The Sex Pistols was the angriest music I could find without looking too hard.
I could have played any number of songs I considered “our songs.” Van Halen’s version of “You Really Got Me” that we danced to during our first official date. “You Shook Me (All Night Long)” by AC/DC which was the first song Jenny and I eve danced to together ran through my mind. It had to play in my head because I smashed the CD with my fist in anger.
The day Jenny died I bought a Johnny Cash record, the one with the cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” and the first Evanescence album. I cried like crazy listening to both of them. I don’t know that Jenny ever heard the songs on these albums but I think that she would have liked them.
By then, it was 2004 and I was almost back on track to my dreams. Now I just needed someone to share them with.
***
Take your time... Don't live too fast,Troubles will come and they will pass.Go find a woman and you'll find love,And don't forget son,There is someone up above.
“Simple Man” Lynard Skynard

I took Brianna with me the second time Halestorm came to Las Vegas, again with Shinedown and again with free tickets. There weren’t the same moments of doubt as the first time. In the months since I met Lzzy and the boys, I had interviewed up-and-coming British band Athlete, members of the Italian metal group Lacuna Coil, and met Rob Zombie. Oh yes, and my ten minutes with Barry, Shinedown’s drummer on that fateful first night.
Beth recognized me and let me right in, no hassles. Brianna was there the whole time, at my side. I made jokes about how she has become Joe’s number one fan and how I wouldn’t mind if she decided to become a groupie. She returned fire by asking me why I didn’t ask Lzzy if she had a boyfriend. It was all friendly joking, with each of us smiling and having a great time.
There is just something about being able to go into a show, being remembered by the band, and seeing the jealous eyes of those turned away because “no cameras or recording equipment are allowed” inside the concert hall.
Some call it rebellion; some call it working the system.
I call it living a rock and roll dream.
We—Brianna, Lzzy, Joe, and me—sat at the coffee shop next to the House of Blues after Halestorm’s set and chatted like old friends. I closed my reporter’s notebook and just talked. Given our ages, we all could have gone to school within a few years of each other. Joe could have taken Brianna to the prom and Lzzy could have been my first crush. Instead, we met like this: me, a writer for a community college paper and his friend going to interview a newly signed band on their first major tour of the country. Beth, band mom and manager, worked the T-shirt stand, eventually running out of copies of “One and Done”, Halestorm’s five song live EP. She peeks in, checking on us, asking if anyone needs a drink, and asks where Arejay and Josh have gone.
“Josh is probably running from the ladies,” Joe says.
“Yeah,” Lzzy agrees. “These Vegas girls love Josh.” No one has a clue where Arejay is.
I wink at Brianna and make another groupie joke. “Don’t worry, Joe,” I say. “You have your own female fans.”
Brianna blushes and I wish I hadn’t said that. I’m starting to think that she could be my Linda McCartney as opposed to being Joe’s Yoko Ono. Sure, Lzzy is super hot—rock-goddess sexy, I believe I said earlier—but Brianna is right there. She is the one who will drive home with me and the one who knows where I live.
We are all good friends now but you won’t read about that in any newspaper article. You won’t read about how I’m going back to Las Vegas for the semester break and that Brianna is at the top of my “people to call” list in a rock magazine.
In our own way, Brianna and I are just as much the future of Rock and Joe and Lzzy are. We are the fans, the ones weaned on Rolling Stone and bootlegged tapes of banned rock and roll bands. We are the ones who will take our kids to see groups like Halestorm just to spend time with our families.
Brianna and I are the kids who showed up to Halestorm’s second show and knew the words to their songs.
We are the future gods of rock.
Oh, you understand, it’s been a long time comin’ Oh, you understand, no offense I’m in love with somebody Found someone who completes me I’m in love with somebody AND IT’S NOT YOU! “It’s Not You” Halestorm Halestorm is in Chicago recording their first full-length album. I tried to make a deal where I could follow them throughout the process and write a book about it. The deal was contingent on them recording in Los Angeles. So here I am, Moscow, Idaho, looking back on my glimpses of rock greatness. I’ve been lucky, lucky enough to see AC/DC during their return to Salt Lake City in 2001. I’ve been lucky enough to be in a position to see a few concerts for free. I’ve been fortunate enough to become friends with a band that, if there are such things as rock gods, will soon rule the charts and airwaves. I’ve been lucky enough to have known a girl as great as Jenny and to meet another wonderful woman in Brianna. The question is: How far can luck carry me? Halestorm didn’t get to where they are by sitting back and letting things happen. It takes hard work and dedication, along with talent, to become a true rock and roll hero. It takes equal dedication to fall in love and make it work. Every AC/DC concert since 1981 ends with the same song. It seems funny, given the title, like something they should play first, but that isn’t how they roll. It isn’t how I roll, either. So, raise your arm and flash the sign of the beast. It is about to get loud in here. Kiss your best girl and bang your head. It is about to get LOUD IN HERE. We ain't no legends ain't no cause
We're just livin' for today
For those about to rock, we salute you
For those about to rock, we salute you “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)” AC/DC