My connection to her also gave me entree into a circle of people who might have otherwise been inaccessible to me. They were academics, all devoted to the local private college at which they (including my philosophy professor father-in-law) had spent decades honing their craft and disseminating knowledge to others. I admired those people, secretly wanted to be like several of them.

Among those was B., a mathematician with the driest of wits and a knack for cracking up even the most ill-humored (and soberest) among us. Many was the time that what little academic decorum we all observed was tossed out the window, in favor of loud storytelling and the occasional feats of skill, usually involving throwing and catching food, or shooting a grape out of one’s nostril, after one had had one or two or four too many cocktails.

This man meant a great deal to me, and to my wife and in-laws, who knew him considerably longer than I. To me, he was a paragon of great humor, a guy with a big heart, and a host with the most, quick with the offer of a refill (usually a nod in the direction of the gin bottle), quicker still with a story about my wife and/or in-laws I’d never before heard, one that would crack me up and leave him with great satisfaction in having been the one to tell me the story.

Nearly four years ago, B. was diagnosed with cancer. He managed to maintain his sense of humor and work schedule through most of his ordeal, but this past March, his doctors determined their treatments had proven ineffective, and B. agreed to discontinue them. He was given a matter of weeks to live.

That he lived seven months after being handed that news was a testament to his will, his strength, and his stubbornness. He focused on the important stuff, retiring from teaching and spending as much time as he could with his wife, children, and grandkids—soccer and baseball games, trips down south and out west, quiet times at home. He received accolades from his peers and students. He was the person of honor at one last, kick-ass party over Memorial Day weekend, where we all ate and drank and, after the food, told great stories about B. right there in front of him, our laughter echoing out into the warm evening.

The afternoon before the Memorial Day shindig, as I was in the kitchen preparing my contribution to the evening’s appetizers, I had Dream Theater’s Score DVD playing in the living room. It’s a great prog concert document, beautifully shot with excellent sound. I stopped cooking when the band started up “I Walk Beside You” early in the film. I’ve loved the song from the first time I heard it, on the Octavarium album, in 2005—it sounds so different from so much of Dream Theater’s typically thorny material, yet it is undeniably them, and undeniably cool.

The jury’s out on what exactly the song is about—is it a lover talking to his beloved, or Christ talking to a believer, or a departed soul, comforting one he left behind? That latter interpretation resonated with me that day, as it does now. The imagery in the second verse is a thing of beauty:

Summon up your ghost from me
Rest your tired thoughts upon my hands
Step inside this sacred place
When all your dreams seem broken

Resonate inside this temple
Let me be the one who understands
Be the one to carry you
When you can walk no further

There’s also that amazing chorus, which lifts its rather pedestrian lyric up to the heavens, through the sheer force of its melody and singer/Fabio lookalike James LaBrie’s voice. It’s one of those progressions that gives you goose bumps, if you’re open and in the right frame of mind for such things. I was then, and am now.

I wish B. had not died. There is a lot I would have given to see him well again. He approached his mortality with a dignity not often afforded those stricken with cancer, fought the disease with gusto, and left this world having made a difference in many lives. Ultimately, that’s the measure of the mark we leave behind, isn’t it? The people we touch, the ones who will remember us fondly, who love us, who we support and walk beside for as long as we’re able—those are the factors that mean the most.  We who knew and loved and now miss B. know this all too well.

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It also meant I could play and say whatever I wanted; even though we were forbidden from swearing on the air and playing songs with swear words in them, none of the station management listened to my show, and the student union didn’t even open until I was off the air, not to mention that any passenger in my car would have known of my potty mouth. I could curse a blue streak, if so moved (though I rarely was—it was too early to get that worked up about much). Two of the three songs I played most often that semester were Neil Young’s “Fuckin’ Up” and Boogie Down Productions’ “Love’s Gonna Get’cha (Material Love),” with KRS-One’s refrain, “Now tell me what the fuck am I supposed to do.”

The third song I played most often was a different thing altogether. I used the show to make tapes of stuff I liked, and also to try out new music (for you kids out there—finding new stuff to listen to wasn’t always as easy as point and click. We’uns had to work hard and take chances to find the good shit). I read something that resembled a review in Rolling Stone of the Boston funk/hair/metal band Extreme’s second record, Pornograffiti. It was a single paragraph in a half-page “Wrap Up” (written by the lovely Kim Neely) that covered five records. The review singled out a song called “More than Words,” which was described as “a placid duet [that] suggests the Beatles.” Curious, I spun the song one morning, and was hooked.

How many times must you hear a song before you get sick of it? Ten? Fifty? Hundreds? By the time “More Than Words” hit Number One in June of 1991, it seemed as though you could hear it on commercial radio all day, every day; as soon as it finished on one Top Forty station, you could turn the dial to the AOR station (for you kids out there—radios used to have dials that enabled one to move from one station to another). Soon as the AOR station was done (with the five-and-a-half-minute album version, not the four-minute single edit), you could flip over to another Top Forty station, and when they were done playing it, you could head to the Adult Contemporary station. Fatigue was certain to set in, and set in it did.

But I still remember the first time I cued it up, in the station’s crappy control room, before many of my fellow collegians were even really awake. The finger-picked chords (G, Cadd9, Am7, C, D, then back to G) were simple—almost too simple for a monster shredder like Nuno Bettencourt. It was a campfire progression, something to play around with after the eightieth chorus of “Kumbayah,” when the bottle’s been emptied and the embers are fading. I remembered singer Gary Cherone from their debut album; on uptempo stuff like “Wind Me Up” and “Kid Ego,” he seemed like some mutant cross between Queen’s Freddie Mercury and KISS’ Paul Stanley. But the tender tone of his voice in “More Than Words” seemed strange, yet strangely perfect. Remember, this was a period when the power ballad was king—the term heavy metal had undergone a rapid expansion, wide enough to include everyone from Maiden and Motorhead to Bon Jovi and Poison, and a good three-quarters or more of the bands in that bracket (not Motorhead) were unplugging and getting all sensitive ‘n’ shit.

“More Than Words” didn’t fit the typical mold, though. For one thing, it was all acoustic—no wee-diddle-diddle solo or whammy bar divebombs after the second chorus. No drums, either—the tap of Bettencourt’s fingers on the pick guard provided the only percussion. It was quiet, dare I say pure—a simple, harmony-rich expression of yearning and devotion and the desire to go deeper in a relationship.

On the album version, it also had a fake ending—coming out of the final chorus, Bettencourt does a little flashy picking, punctuated with a hard-plucked harmonic, and the first time I played it on the air, I thought the song was done. Started into my stop-set, back-announcing the song, only to find myself countered by Cherone’s falsetto as it wafted back in, going into one last expression of the song’s title, before Bettencourt ended things with the final G chord.

That awkward moment aside, I thought “More Than Words” was the bee’s knees; played it damn near every show until I gave up the radio thing at semester’s end. And even though commercial radio played it to death, I never stopped digging it. Dig it to this day, even though the only f-bombs in it are the occasional ones I add when singing along.

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By far the coolest thing I did in this period was officiate the nuptials of two good friends. To my utter shock, it was perfectly legal in the Commonwealth o’ PA to do so, long as I got “ordained” by an existing religious institution and did a couple other fellowshippin’-type things with the bride and groom prior to the big day. I even studied up on case law, a) to make sure such an enterprise was legit, and K. and B. would not discover, a decade down the line, that they’d been living in sin for ten years longer than they’d thought; and b) so that when K.’s parents asked me whether there was indeed lawyerin’-type precedent for a non-believing ex-Baptist like myself to hitch their daughter to B.’s wagon, I could answer unequivocally in the affirmative.

The wedding itself was a lovely affair, something I could take only tangential credit for. The fire breathers that stood at either side of the entrance and greeted each guest with twin blasts of overhead flame managed to do so without burning down the hall—impressive, but not as impressive as the lariat twirler who scampered up and down the aisle, darting under and over her rope as she showed the guests to their seats. The pre-ceremony music was interesting—Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants,” played through one of those Bose systems you see on TV—but so was the scent of orchids and bulbines, piped in from a whole line of ‘jacked Buckmister Scent Dispersal units (one of which, the bride was aghast to find out, still contained a whiff of doe pheromone. This was okay, though—it just made the guests hungry, though one groomsman reported being a little turned on).

At the last minute, I abandoned my twenty-minute homily that compared marriage to the Somme Offensive, the “Time Capsule” episode of Happy Days, and the 1988 “Fog Bowl” game between the Eagles and the Bears. I went instead with five minutes on love and marriage, as envisioned by Sammy Kahn and voiced by Frank Sinatra, which I suppose was nice, but which lacked the scope and grandeur of my originally intended message.

What I was thinking, though, as my friends faced me and I spoke to them and their gathered loved ones (and the fire breathers and lariat twirler), was not “Love and Marriage,” but the lyrics to another song, one I’ve loved for nearly 30 years, which was performed at my wedding, nearly 16 years ago.

As I’ve written before, the first time I heard Survivor’s “Ever Since the World Began,” I was 12 or 13, and have always considered it a perfect wedding anthem. I imagined it playing the moment the groom stands alone at the altar, just before the bride comes down the aisle. In many ways that moment is a culminating event — as if his entire life has somehow been lived simply to lead him to that point. The opening verse speaks to that idea of summation and destiny:

I’ll never know what brought me here
As if somebody led my hand
It seems I hardly had to steer
My course was planned
And destiny it guides us all
And by its hand we rise and fall
But only for a moment
Time enough to catch our breath again

There is a weight present in those words, and in the music and melody that accompany them. The singer acknowledges the enormity of the moment, in terms of personal accomplishment and the progression of a life to an important milestone. The opening lines of the chorus, however, put it all into perspective—how even the most significant moment of a life is rendered somehow smaller by the true enormity of the universe that surrounds every individual:

And we’re just another piece of the puzzle
Just another part of the plan
How one life touches the other
It’s so hard to understand

It’s difficult to understand, but there’s no harm in trying, and our understanding—our very willingness to try—is bolstered by the strength we find when we find one another, when love binds us:

Still we walk this road together
We try and go as far as we can
And we have waited for this moment in time
Ever since the world began

Of course, there’s no proof that the “wedding anthem” angle is present anywhere but in my head—writers Jim Peterik and Frankie Sullivan pitched “Ever Since” to Sylvester Stallone, for use in Rocky III (instead of that one, Stallone went with a different tune, one about a tiger or ophthalmology or something), and eventually Sly used the tune in his unwatchable prison flick Lock Up. Tommy Shaw covered it on his second solo album, and current Journey frontman Arnel Pineda’s  incredible performance of the song was one of the YouTube clips that guitar god/D.C. Housewife boinker Neal Schon saw, that got the Filipino wonder his gig.

The mystery and passion inherent to the song are its hallmarks, regardless of who’s singing it, or which piece of celluloid it’s cued up behind. The best, longest-lived marriages are likewise the ones in which the spouses maintain mystery with and passion for one another. I’m grateful for the last 16 years of my marriage, and wish K. and B. all the best in theirs. A little doe pheromone can go a long way.

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Addicts turn to their substances of choice for escape, when what they need—what we all, in fact, need—is safety, a place both physical and emotional where they can be confident they are free from harm, and from harming others. One of the most indelible mental pictures I have of Jani Lane was from his stint on the abysmal VH1 program Celebrity Fit Club. Through some back-room machinations or narrative manipulations, Lane—in recovery from his alcohol abuse—stands outside a bowling alley were he used to get drunk, in an effort to face down a demon by returning to the place where it had routinely possessed him. Lane is obviously unprepared to handle such a confrontation, and responds with a tearful display of raw emotion that made even the most cynical among us think that he just might make it through his troubles, in spite of the clearly embarrassing positions the show put him and his fellow contestants in, both in front of and behind the camera.

He would not go in the building; he knew he was not strong enough to handle it, and he stayed away.

Ultimately, though, the temptations of his vocation and the vigilance required to overcome the physical and emotional pull of alcohol proved too much. He’d already relapsed once during the course of the program, and, though he did not walk into the bowling alley that day, no one but he could speak to how often he returned, literally or figuratively, once the show wrapped.

The music Lane made with Warrant—particularly on their first two records—is textbook lite metal, often cited, for better or worse, as emblematic of the genre. The title track of 1990′s Cherry Pie, with its swaggering salaciousness and cartoonishly horny video, stands as one of the band’s defining moments, along with “Heaven,” their first and best voyage to power ballad Valhalla. From the bittersweet intro—with its notes of nostalgia and earnest acoustic strumming—to the enormous chorus that lit up a few hundred arenas back in the day, to the verses that pile on the heartache and, finally, the determination to hold on and move forward—”Heaven” is that haunting, overwhelmingly beautiful expression of everything that is cosmically right about the power ballad arts.

The video just adds to the song’s special qualities. It’s a typical “band on the road” clip, with both live and soundstage performance footage and oodles of backstage hijinks and shots of Warrant’s fans. The central figure, though, is Jani Lane—doe-eyed, perfectly coiffed, dare I say beautiful Jani Lane—a singer, a sex symbol, a dream boat, and, yes, a rock star. There were lots of rock stars like him back then—big-haired, leather-clad, skinny boys who sang and played and emoted and drank and snorted and smoked and fucked their way through the decadence of that exceedingly decadent era.

For a couple years, Jani Lane walked among them, towered above them on occasion, but the era ended; lite metal bands famously gave way to Alice in Chains and their grunge god ilk. Warrant soldiered on, both with and without Lane, but now the band remains (their most recent record with singer Robert Mason, Rockaholic, is quite good) and we no longer have Jani Lane (or Robbin Crosby, or Kevin DuBrow, or Steve Clark, or for that matter Andrew Wood, or Layne Staley, or Hillel Slovak, or Brad Nowell, or Shannon Hoon, or Amy Winehouse). His loss is immeasurable for his family, his kids, his friends and his fans.

The right song can provide one’s mind and heart with some small modicum of emotional strength—”Heaven” is one such song, and we have Jani Lane, its author and voice, to thank for it. It is unfortunate and, ultimately, heartbreaking that that kind of strength proved too elusive, too far away, for Lane himself to find.

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For years, I thought the top song the week of July 19, 1988 was Cheap Trick’s “The Flame,” which sorta made sense and sorta didn’t. I’m a big fan of the band, particularly of Robin Zander, its chief vocal- and focal point; I love the song (you’ll find out how much in a future column); and I did play the shit out of it in the period of its chart run. But as the soundtrack of my life? It didn’t compute, at least not since I met, wooed, and married my wife. Soundtracks are eternal; the premise of “The Flame” only fit my life for a relatively short period.

I have recently, however, discovered an error in either the input I provided the Web page or in the algorithm within the page itself. Turns out “The Flame” was the Number One song the week of July 9, 1988. The chart-topper the week of July 23 (which included the 19th) was actually Richard Marx’s power ballad “Hold on to the Nights.”

Now that makes more sense, soundtrack-wise.

The song is about unrequited love, chances lost, hearts broken, unceasing pondering on the question, “What might have been?” It’s about the proverbial crossroads moments—what might have happened if you had made a left turn, instead of a right? There are times when I contemplate entire series of such decision points—what if I’d chosen College B instead of College A? What if I had stayed in Location X, rather than moving to Location Y? What if I had kissed her, instead of letting the opportunity slip by? What real harm would have befallen me, had I stood up for myself, rather than backing down? What if I had backed down on that other thing, rather than imposing the outcome? What might have become of us had we not broken up when we did? What if I had tried harder at achieving that thing, rather than giving up and moving on?

If the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, alternate universes exists in which all those questions have been answered, but that’s too much to contemplate right now. I prefer the Rob Fleming approach, named after the protagonist in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity—the guy who revisits the key relationships of his life to figure out why each of them deteriorated, and to determine what those reasons said about him as a companion, as a man, and as a human being. I’m too old for that shit, though, and the answers I’d find were I to revisit too many crossroads moments would likely prove too embarrassing; I have a low enough level of self-esteem as it is, and it would be just like me to focus too hard on times in which I’d made a total ass of myself, before choosing one direction over the other, and I’d wind up walking out in the path of a bus, or taking a handful of those over there and washing them down with a fifth of this over here, or doing something else even dumber than that.

I only got the universe I’m in, quantum mechanics be damned, and no amount of postulatin’ or theorizin’ is gonna do me much good now. Besides which, who’s to say I didn’t make all the right decisions, right?

Right?

But you know, when I’ve drained enough out of that bottle over there (no, not that one—the other one, with the Swedish label) and “Hold on to the Nights” comes on the radio, or pops up in my shuffle, or some other tortured or nostalgic soul loads it into the jukebox, those moments reappear in front of me, and I can’t help myself—I fall into the vortex of memory and regret. I find it hard to not get lost in the thought of moments like the one Marx describes in the middle eight:

Well, I think that I’ve been true to everybody else but me
And the way I feel about you makes my heart long to be free
Every time I look into your eyes I’m helplessly aware
That the someone I’ve been searching for is right there

You do what’s right, what you think is right, what everyone tells you is right—you’re true to everyone but yourself, and in the process you miss out on something truly special, perhaps someone truly special. It’s all right there in front of you, within your reach, and you never even move to grab it. You can submerge that frustration in whatever is handy, but all it takes is the right trigger—in this case, a 20-something-year-old song—and it all comes back to stab at you again.

I’m a lucky man—I’m sure I’ve said that in other columns, and I’ll say it again in future ones. I have a wonderful wife, a great kid, a handful of friends who mean the world to me. If you’re as lucky as I am, you know what I’m talking about—there’s much to be thankful for. But we are complicated people, regardless of whether we realize or acknowledge it—somewhere inside us all lays the seeds of regret, of lost chances. None of us has gotten it right 100 percent of the time. Owning up to that side of us is healthy; it keeps us from doing something even more regretful in the moments when that regret seizes us, when the vortex opens up and pulls us in.

I don’t understand how anyone can hear “Hold on to the Nights” and not fall into the same hole. That’s why I think my buddy’s Web page was right—the Number One song 23 years ago is indeed my song, the one that I’ll carry around with me for as long as I can carry anything. I know to most people it’s a piece of fluff—a fey whimper, an annoyance. Not here. Not by a long shot.

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The moment freezes, even in the heat, and you take in everything around you—the heat of the driver’s seat against your bare legs, where your shorts don’t cover; the dusty topography of the dashboard you never can remember to clean; the can of Sprite sitting in the cup holder hooked onto the door, to your left; the duffel bags in the back seat—yours and hers, leaning into each other in an awkward arrangement, the result of a careless toss; your breath—easy, smooth, in spite of the unconditioned humidity in the car; the feel of the hot steering wheel in your hands, the give of the gas pedal under your foot; the song on the radio as the car moves swiftly and purposefully toward your destination.

Ah, the song. The music of the moment. The soundtrack of your realization, your recognition of love as something you had in you but could not share before now. You don’t recognize the artist at first; the synthesizer plinking that opens the song fails to catch your full attention. Then the verse slides in:

In a lifetime
Made of memories
I believe
In destiny
Every moment returns again in time
When I’ve got the future on my mind
Know that you’ll be the only one

The two of you haven’t been together all that long, and yet there are so many things you know you’ll one day remember as the foundation of your life together—that “lifetime made of memories.” It’s that future the singer’s talking about, a destiny you only recognize when looking back upon it; it’s invisible before that because you’re too busy living it—like this moment, now, in the car, driving while she sleeps.

You move forward; the song moves forward.

In a lifetime
There is only love
Reaching for the lonely one
We are stronger when we are given love
When we put emotions on the line
Know that we are the timeless ones

“We are stronger when we are given love.” Love is something that’s inside us all, but it just sits there until we can share it with someone else. You want to share yours with her; you think she knows it; you hope she feels the same way; you think she does. You know you feel stronger when you’re with her; a line like “Know that we are the timeless ones” can only make sense when you feel this strong. It’s the only time such an odd, otherworldly sentiment elicits a knowing nod and not laughter.

Yet, there’s still no small amount of vulnerability here. When we put ourselves on the line—emotionally, physically, wholly, fully—we leave ourselves open for a world of hurt. That’s why the chorus knocks something loose within you:

Meet me half way
Across the sky
Out where the world belongs
To only you and I

Meet me half way
Across the sky
Make this a new beginning of another life.

She needs to reciprocate, to put herself on the line, as well. She repositions herself a bit in her seat, and you notice her lips, her neck, the light sheen of sweat on her shoulder, where the strap of her shirt has moved slightly as she leans further into the window breeze. You’re an hour away from your destination, but you want to pull the car over, gently nudge her awake, and tell her everything that’s stirring in you now, want to tell her before the song ends, while the many iterations of the singer’s voice repeat that chorus, the one iteration that practically cries in the back of the mix late in the song. You want to know what she knows; what she’s feeling; whether she’s willing to put herself out there with you; whether she, too, believes a new beginning is possible. What would she say?

In another frozen moment you’ll never forget, she opens her eyes, sees you, and smiles.

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There was definitely no shortage of incongruity present in the record, which I was informed was part of a Kidz Bop compilation, a name with which I was familiar from television commercials my boy routinely used as fodder for begging. These records, released at a rate of two per year, feature the hits of the day, sung largely by an anonymous group of children—sort of like NOW collections, only for kindergartners. They are quite popular; since 2005, all but one of the 13 consecutively numbered hits records released under the Kidz Bop moniker have debuted in the Billboard Top Ten.

Kidz Bop is a property of Razor & Tie, which makes total sense. R&T’s founders Cliff Chenfeld and Craig Balsam started the company in the 1990s as a way of marketing their ’70s Preservation Society compilations on TV, and they eventually became significant players not only in the mail-order compilation biz, but also in the small but relatively lucrative genre of niche reissues. And they were totally into their products. I interviewed Chenfeld in 1999 for another publication, and, while closing out our chat, thanked him for reissuing two Gary U.S. Bonds records (Dedication and On the Line) that had meant a great deal to me growing up. Chenfeld responded by singing the first few bars the chorus of Bonds’ “Love’s on the Line.” I was impressed; the man had, through is actions and voice, immediately amassed a great deal of goodwill in my book.

Twelve years on, we may very well be back to zero. See, someone in the R&T family decided to marry the Kidz Bop franchise to one of the company’s other big hits—the hair metal power ballad collections released under the title Monster Ballads, otherwise known as The Greatest Albums Ever Released by Humans, for they scale the great Olympus of rock and bring forth from the hand of Zeus himself enough thunder and lightning and Aqua Net (little-known fact: Zeus loved the hair lacquer) to keep a billion Bics aloft and lit for all eternity. Kidz Bop Sings Monster Ballads takes 15 of the greatest expressions of love, lust, and world-weary confusion ever performed by skinny long-haired men in tight leather pants and reduces them to little more than kiddie karaoke.

Such an appalling display of disrespect for an already largely disrespected subgenre should make all those responsible ashamed. They should be lured from their offices by the smell of freshly minted $100 bills, thrown into a gypsy cab and taken to Times Square, where they should then be compelled to strip to their undies and perform “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” with the Naked Cowboy until they repent and vow to pull this sodden excuse for entertainment from store shelves and never, ever, ever do anything like this again.

They might even be joined by media whore/Poison front man Bret Michaels, if he catches wind of it in advance. Michaels might even be the Naked Cowboy by now; if there’s a crowd to suck up to and/or a camera within 50 yards of any given spot, he and his bandana and six-pack abs are probably nearby. He has a nominal role in this Kidz/Monster comp, playing acoustic guitar on a run through “Every Rose,” while his two daughters join the kiddie choir on the choruses. All of which makes me ask, “Is it possible that Rikki Rockett has been the coolest member of Poison all along?”

The setup for each of the tracks on the album is pretty much consistent: two shaky solo voices (a boy and a girl) trade lines on the verses, then come together with a small battalion of other kids on the choruses. There’s little attempt made at harmony. The instrumentation is pure karaoke-level keyboard, guitar, and synth drum. Solos are truncated, and lyrics are scrubbed for any references to drugs, violence, bestiality, cunnilingus, heavy petting, nipple licking, fingerbanging, passion propellers, or milk-and-water embraces. There are also no references to the Dirty Sanchez or the Three-Eyed Turtle, but then again, there never were to begin with.

I suppose the argument could be made, however briefly and none too convincingly, that if you like power ballads and want your kids to like power ballads, Kidz Bop Sings Monster Ballads might prove to be a useful gateway to entice your spawn into a greater appreciation of your favorite songs. Hogwash. If I want to indoctrinate my boy into the pleasures of “Home Sweet Home,” I already have Theatre of Pain. If I want him to dig “The Flame,” I want him to hear Robin Zander sing to the heavens, not some prepubescent Glee reject. Razor & Tie can keep “Wind of Change,” “Don’t Know What You Got (Til It’s Gone),” and “Wait”—I never liked them much anyway. But hands off “Is This Love,” pal—do you know what we used to do when that song came on?

I’m sure Kidz Bop Sings Monster Ballads will recoup whatever modest investment R&T put into the thing, and they might even make another piece of product just like it. But to those of us who actually care about this music—and make no mistake: we’re out there—this compilation is an abomination at best, and an insult at worst. I’d love to just ignore it, but it bothers me so.

Now if you’ll excuse me, the wife and I are filling up our side-by-side bathtubs—the ones that overlook a rich countryside and sunset, 24 hours a day. I gotta find my copy of “Is This Love” before the water gets cold.

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He was probably right. You’re not very attractive men. Only the guys in Blue Oyster Cult and the douchebags in Uriah Heep pull fewer chicks on the road. It’s one reason you love to tour with Blue Oyster Cult and Uriah Heep; next to them, you are the golden gods you always imagine yourself being. If your wives back home ever find out, though, you’re done for.

It’s 1975. You’re in the studio, working on your next album, and it’s chockablock cock rock—fierce fucking stuff, maybe the best songs you’ve every come up with. Your guitars cruch and rumble. Your singer, Dan McCafferty, sounds like he swallowed Satan’s gonads and chased them with Robert Plant’s liquefied soul. You have a song with a chorus that simply repeats the sentence “Now you’re messing with a son of a bitch” over and over. You’re thinking of calling it “Hair of the Dog,” for no apparent reason (maybe because “hair of the dog” sounds sorta like “heir of the dog,” or “son of a bitch.” Nah. You’re clever, but not that clever). This song will one day get a college freshman DJ in trouble, as he thought it was okay to play over community airwaves. He was wrong. It will, nonetheless, become the theme song to the as-yet-unmade film about his life.

Anyway, you’re in the studio, churning out some hellacious rock, and someone suggests the need for a ballad—probably your guitar player, Manny Charlton, who had supplanted Deep Purple’s Roger Glover as your producer of choice. Manny’s a good bloke, but he’s a bit of a softie—you’ve already recorded songs by Joni Mitchell (“This Flight Tonight”) and Tomorrow (“My White Bicycle”) previously, and you don’t want to become just another hard rock band who become famous for cover tunes. You’ve already cut a version of Randy Newman’s “Guilty” for this record, but you balk at Manny’s suggestion to cover Tiny Tim’s “Daddy, Daddy, What Is Heaven Like?”

Someone—again, probably Manny—suggests the chestnut “Love Hurts.” You balk at that, too. Who wants to hear a big-willied cock rock juggernaut like Nazareth cover a Boudleaux Bryant song made famous by the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison? Who would want to hear a Nazareth version after hearing Jimmy Webb bleat it, or hearing Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris sing a transcendent version of the song, right before Parsons packed his Nudie suit and shuffled off to the great opryhouse in the sky? And word has it that Jim Capaldi and Cher are covering it for their next records, and God knows no one in Nazareth wants to be associated with them.

Then Manny brings those three bottles of Glenmorangie over to the studio that one fateful night, and the arguments end. And you, Nazareth—you put your indelible stamp on “Love Hurts.”

The gently picked opening guitar figure woos the listener into an immediate trance, punctuated by a couple fierce cymbal crashes and a brief cesaura before McCafferty enters to plead in the most sensitive of cock rock voices those truth-filled words:

Love hurts, love scars
Love wounds and mars
Any heart not tough
Or strong enough
To take a lot of pain
Take a lot of pain
Love is like a cloud
Holds a lot of rain
Love hurts

You look around the studio as the words pour from McCafferty, and everyone puts down their Glenmorangies, mouths agape, and breathes in the pain of this man, of this voice, of these words. By the time the middle eight comes around, there is not an arm in the place that is not rippling with goose bumps.

Some folks think of happiness
Blissfulness, togetherness
Some fools fool themselves, I guess
They’re not foolin’ me

I know it isn’t true
I know it isn’t true
Love is just a lie
Made to make you blue
Love hurts

Then the solo—oh God, now you see why Manny pushed for the song. The single bent note is an arrow to the heart. It ups the drama, the pain, the despondent desolation of the lyrics and the man giving them voice. It is short, and it blends into the final verse in a single, glorious flow. When it ends, even the walls of the studio have begun weeping over what has transpired within them. Glasses once more are raised in tribute to the moment.

It works. Your song ascends to the Billboard Top Ten in the States. Your album goes platinum. For a season, you, Nazareth, ascend to top billing status in arenas across this land. When you play “Love Hurts,” fifteen thousand lighters are held aloft before you, as befitting one of the mightiest of power ballads.

Others have followed in your path—Triumph, Joan Jett, Heart, Rod Stewart, Pat-fucking-Boone—but none have outdone your performance; they can only hope to copy it, only hope that some of your magic rubs off on them, though it never does.

Well played, Nazareth. Well played.

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Red‘s brevity is largely responsible for my biggest beef about the book—the dearth of information on the creation of key Hagar records. I’m a total geek for stories of studio sessions, of who played on what, who jammed with whom, how this or that song was conceived, etc. There’s a wee bit of that in Red, but for the most part, Hagar spends more time discussing his business affairs, anonymous trysts, and grudges with Eddie Van Halen than he does going into the process of creating music. Hagar is an engaging guy (it’d break my heart if I ever found out he’s an asshole), but the book is an exercise in surface-skimming, and a disappointment to longtime fans like me who expected a deeper dive into his life and work.

Of late, the quality of Hagar’s recordings has waxed (Chickenfoot’s debut, for example) and waned (2008′s Cosmic Universal Fashion). Not surprisingly, there’s no mention in Red about the 2002 record Not 4 Sale, and that’s a shame, cuz it’s a solid, no-bullshit rock and roll record. With one exception (the strange mashup “Whole Lotta Zep”), the album is a concise, high-quality mix of anthems and good-timey, rough-and-tumble hard rock, and it is, at least to these ears, one of Hagar’s better solo records.

It contains a standout addition to the power ballad canon in “Halfway to Memphis,” a road song in which Hagar preaches a powerful gospel of self-determination and confidence. Hagar has long juxtaposed songs with serious, even spiritual themes, with party anthems or songs about kinky sex—remember, Van Halen’s “Right Now” (the grandest of Hagar’s grand gestures) was on an album whose title was a play on the word fuck, a few clicks of the forward button removed from tracks that praised phone sex services and described a lover’s sexual prowess as a sweet baked good. The man can adapt.

“Halfway to Memphis” starts with the setting of a poignant scene: the kind of long drive you take when you need to clear your head, sort things out, leave a problem in your rearview mirror. This drive appears to be longer than most:

Halfway to Memphis, drivin’ in the rain
Self confidence slippin’, still runnin’ away
From the face in the mirror, the lines on the face
From New York City to the San Francisco Bay
From the ghost in the closet, the monkey on your back
From the one that really knows you, been there watchin’ your back
But the fire in your belly still burns

The lyrics are just vague enough to fit many different scenarios—the protagonist could be running from the memory or a trauma, a lost love, or a lost loved one. He could be facing some sort of existential crisis—”the face in the mirror” that isn’t all that recognizable anymore—or running from the scene of a screw-up or personal failing (that “ghost in the closet, the monkey on your back”). His self-confidence is shot; an unpleasant self-loathing is beginning to set in.

Not to fear—Sammy brings his inner Oprah to the fore, just in time for a chorus of empowerment:

Just be yourself
You’re like no one else
There’s nobody like you
You can’t find it on the shelf
Just let the world know
That you’re ready for show
Count three and let go
Before you turn around and go home

In many cases, being yourself is probably what got you into trouble in the first place, but no matter. I love those last two lines: “Count three and let go / Before you turn around and go home.” Regardless of how bad things are or seem, you have to turn back around and face them, and letting go of that which weakens you is the only way to make that move.

Hagar’s protagonist ventures further, “Down by the lilikoi, near the old stone wall” where “nothing much changes, but the seasons still change,” still looking for peace, still hoping that to simply believe in himself will cure what ails him. In the middle eight, Hagar even invokes that most angel-voiced of seekers, Jeff Buckley, to illustrate how alone his voice is, how that alone-ness is necessary to finding himself.

Hagar liked “Halfway to Memphis” so much, he re-recorded it for his 2006 record Livin’ It Up! (a.k.a., the “I’ll Have What Jimmy Buffet and Kenny Chesney Are Having” album), moving the levels up on the acoustic guitar tracks and adding a pedal steel line to tie it in with the album’s laid-back, countryish ambience. It still worked. My guess is, “Halfway to Memphis” will see daylight again when Hagar makes his Afrobeat, New Orleans jazz, and Tuvan throat singing albums. And it will still work. Road songs about unfettered longing and self-determination work in damn near any setting.

I just wish Sammy Hagar had thought enough of the song to mention it in his book.

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In many ways, the first Gulf War was conducted and portrayed in such a way as to make amends for Vietnam—not to apologize for it, but to gather support at home for a military that had, as an institution, suffered from nightly television coverage of death and destruction, from horrific events like My Lai, from political upheaval at the highest levels of our government, and from general cultural insanity back home. Everything about the first Gulf War was calibrated by the powers that drove it, to shape the perceptions of the war effort in the U.S., and to contribute to a general “Support the Troops” ethos that had eluded the country in the wake of Vietnam, the lack of which had haunted military brass for two decades.

Today’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya have made us so very aware of the sacrifices of our soldiers and, by extension, their families—of the dangers they face; the potential for grievous injuries; the time away from their loved ones; the emotional and, in many cases, financial tolls they’ve incurred; and the weariness of being virtually the only group asked bear the burden for a war effort that has gone on too long, for too little, at too great a cost. The first Gulf War’s tight media coverage, “clinical” execution, and compressed timeframe hid these sacrifices from public view, with most tension relieved by the parades and rah-rah welcomes when the bulk of the troops came home.

The fear of the unknown, however, was real at the outset of the war, and folks at home and abroad found meaning in unlikely places. Like a Styx song. “Show Me the Way” was written by front man Dennis DeYoung as an encouragement for keeping one’s faith—in God and/or humanity—in a world in which hatred and destruction seemed to lurk around every corner.

DeYoung bemoans the fact that, even in adulthood, one could be disappointed by those he held in high esteem—saints who turn into sinners, childhood heroes who “have fallen to idols of clay.” All are “illusions” to be washed away at the metaphorical “river” to which preachers have taken sinners since they days of Christ himself, to be baptized into belief. This time, though, DeYoung asks to be cleansed not from sin, but from fantasy, from false impressions. It’s a fascinating conundrum—he wants to believe less, in order to believe more.

Listeners worried about war latched on to the second verse:

And as I slowly drift to sleep
For a moment dreams are sacred
I close my eyes and know that there’s peace
In a world so filled with hatred
That I wake up each morning and turn on the news
To find we’ve so far to go
And I keep on hoping for a sign
So afraid I just won’t know

We were all waking up to what we perceived to be the realities of war—machines and explosives and weapons and good men and women fighting for us and bad, determined enemies fighting against us. This was the narrative we believed, the one we were given, the illusions we could not seem to wash away. Military families, however, were giving so much more—to wake up and “find we’ve so far to go” meant more meals they wouldn’t have with their loved ones, more questions from their children, more jumping every time the phone rang or there was a knock on the door, for fear of what news might be awaiting them.

Disc jockeys keyed in on this uncertainty, and began mixing news audio and interviews with military wives and kids into the instrumental breaks of “Show Me the Way.” I loathed the practice then and I loathe it now—the cynical attempt to tug on listeners’ heart strings, using the voices of those suffering and sacrificing the most as bait. You heard it everywhere, though—the song steadily climbed the charts, becoming one of Styx’s biggest hits (to this day, their last time in the Top Ten) and, along with such pabulum as Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” a de rigueur playlist entry.

You were, however, in serious trouble if your heart could not be moved by the song’s key lyric—the brief bridge to the guitar solo section over which the bulk of the deejay edits were made. The words are inescapable, even today:

And if I see a light, should I believe?
Tell me how will I know?

Crises of faith arise when the things we believe in most let us down—people, institutions, the things we worship, the ideas and ideals we hold dear. How do we know what we truly can believe in? In 1990 and ’91, we embraced one another when we could no longer embrace the uncertainty before us. It happened again in the wake of 9/11 when, instead of us striking someone else, we ourselves were hit, and our collective confusion and pain left us holding up one another, believing in one another, even as we found so little else to strengthen our spirits.

Lots of people my age have kids who have never known a time when the United States was not at war. When that’s no longer the case—when we extract ourselves from these conflicts, when we begin to repair the people and families our wars have broken, begin to recover the things we’ve lost in the last decade, when all that happens—we’ll have something worthy of our faith, something we can truly, collectively believe in. Right now, though, we’ve so far to go—so very, very far.

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