Rock and Roll Will Never Die

I do not know why I chose that headline. I keep hearing that song in my head tonight. Not just the Neil Young Song but my friend from High School, Scott Adams, doing the song over and over. I also keep hearing him do the line about "...this is the story of Johnny Rotten..." Something like that I think, anyway. My memory runs like an endless scrapbook full of random and seemingly disconnected, weird memories that occupy a lot of my consciousness.

Like I have another recurring flashback about the same guy from my childhood. He was in this rock band- a U2 wannabe group and he got a bleach blonde mullet. Well, not really a mullet, but he had sort of a big hair look on top with the long hair in the back. They did a concert once at the local Civic Center and he wore acid-washed jeans. Scott is a really little guy, too, and he had like size 22 jeans. I think he shopped in the girl's department. I just remember that he liked to wear vests and he had some wrestling shoes he wore with his outfits as well as a dangly earring. Really 80's (it was 1989, so I guess that was OK, too).

Scott also was a Jaws afficianado and always was obsessed with technology, whatever he could get his hands onto. We made a stop-action movie with GI joes one time called "Laser Attack." The plot line was strikingly similar to Star Wars, i think (he saw it over 100 times the summer it came out. In fact, the little fucker had the coolest summer job ever wearing a Jawa costume at the theater). We used a Styx song as the soundtrack and played it over and over in the movie. He even recorded every voice on the soundtrack and could keep it synched up to the movie by stopping and starting it at strategic times. The Styx Song was the one on the record "Cornerstone" that was the prologue to their epic JRR Tolkien tribute "The Lord of the Rings..." Styx.. that bastion on late-seventies counter-culture.

I saw him a year or two ago and he was still obsessed with Jaws. In fact, he had turned his main hobby- TV Watching- into a full-time job because he got a job working for a company that installs home theaters. He had also been in a U2 tribute band as a singer. He was an incredible mimic and had a mind that remembered most everything it heard so he knew everything about U2 music. (I liked U2 before him, though. He learned about them from our friend Jon who moved down to Gainesville from Wisconsin). I was over there with my baby boy ( the visit was cut short by a really bad diaper emergency and my lack of supplies). He looked like he had grown a few inches, strangely enough, and he was not so skinny any more. He still smoked a lot and he drank low-carb beer. He also played a lot of video games and lived in a tract house as well. Oh well. No stone-wash jeans, however, and the mullet had been trimmed.