To Be Continued, Part 1

Of all of the blogs I’ve posted this year, I don’t think I’ve really even touched on my encounters with *ahem* fame as it applies to rock ‘n’ roll.

It’s sad, really.

I haven’t gone out and counted the specific Letters From The Past which were the product of opening the laptop, typing something, and posting it to the web. Did you notice I mentioned no use of collected or focused thought?

Yeah there’s a reason for that.

I would bet a quarter of this year’s entries were done that way.

Sad, I know.

To think that I could have been regaling you with stories about my brushes with the debauchery of the good stuff that took place in the late 80’s instead of subjecting you to mindless writer’s block is quite disgusting.

So let’s just dispense with the griping about the bad blogs and move along. Shall we?

Set aside that time in 2000 when Vivien Campbell threw a guitar pick at me. It hit my chest, fell to the floor and got picked up by some girl near me before I could put my foot on it.

Dagnabbit.

I’ve had three encounters with rock stars in my life. All of them happened in the 80’s.

Now I imagine that some of you may know about one those encounters. Any of you who have ever played the game “Two truths and a lie” as an icebreaker exercise in the conference room next to Cubeville will recognize encounter number 3 if you were unfortunate enough to be strapped with figuring out which line of bull I just uttered was a flat out lie.

The first encounter came in 1986. The Georgia Satellites had broken out onto the scene and was rocking the country in their dulcet, three chord songs admonishing people to not “give them no lines and keep their hands to there self”.

Baffling double negative aside, they were the reason people wanted to rock back then. One night, the latest flash in the pan came to the Casper Events Center in Wyoming to put on a show to approximately 25% of the arena. The remaining 75% of it had been roped off for other activities like a rummage sale or something.

At the time, my chief source of income was a part time job at the aforementioned events center. Whenever a taste of culture gave up the ghost and visited the prairie in hopes of a making a buck or two by putting on a concert or some other show, I was on the crew of mullet sporting lunkheads who donned a pair of blue coveralls and cleaned the joint up afterword.

Working after a basketball game was always the worst. Sweeping and mopping all of the aged and spilled beer and popcorn out of each of those aisles produced the odoriferous sensation in one’s nose which was consistent with a pit bull belching point blank in your face.

Nasty.

Anyway, I arrived for work when the concert was nearly over. The Georgia Satellites had opened the show. For the life of me, I can’t remember who headlined it. None the less, I put my coveralls on, and walked down the back hallway with my broom to get ready to go to work sweeping for a little over $4 an hour.

Keep in mind that it’s the back hallways that connect the arena to the locker/dressing rooms where the guest entertainment chill when they’re not on stage. It’s hallways like that where leather clad hootchies would work their magic with various members of the band’s crew and security in order to earn some face time with the band.

*pause for effect*

Yeah, none of that was going on at that point of the evening. Sorry to lead you astray.

At the point I walked down that hallway, I noticed members of the band were just standing around shooting the bull. For reasons unknown to me, the drummer made eye contact with me. The fact that he had drumsticks in his hands is the only thing that really clued me into his profession. I barely knew who these guys were, as I had only heard their breakout song a few times before participating in the unintended encounter.

Dude gave me a dirty look. I’ve got no reason why. I hadn’t said ‘Hi’, or nodded, or even tilted my head up and inquired “Sup?” All I was doing was walking by so that I could prepare to clean up after the people who felt compelled to get drunk so they could enjoy the opening act.

So that was encounter number 1. As much as I would like to continue with the other two exciting stories of how rock ‘n’ roll has shaped the life of your favorite blogger on the internet, I’m going to do something I haven’t done before.

I’m going to throw a “To Be Continued” at you.

I haven’t really had the occasion to blog in installments in the years that TharpSter.Org has been up and running.

It would seem I have a few reasons to do it today though: