Dazed and Confused, Part 1

A few weeks ago, as I was preparing to exchange our standard definition DVR cable box for a high definition DVR cable box, I caught up on some movies I had recorded but hadn't yet gotten around to watching. One of them was Dazed and Confused, and watching it was one of the most poignant experiences I've had in a while. It is, I think, a very good movie, but my reaction to it was so complicated and so emotional that I can't really say for sure. I may have more to say about that later.But from the first notes of "Sweet Emotion" under the opening credits to one of the main character's response to his football coach at the end of the movie that his summer's goal was not to stay in playing shape, but to get Aerosmith tickets, I found myself back in that forgotten reality where Aerosmith was the only band in the world. Though there's some risk of my falling prey to the "infinite regress of nostalgia":http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38543 here, I won't—first because "I never really thought Aerosmith was all that great":http://mog.com/morgannels/blog_post/28959, and second because I just missed that reality (though I did encounter enough of its remnants to believe that it existed).In early 1978, at the age of ten, I moved from Hartford, CT, where everyone I knew was listening to Top 40 radio with a particular emphasis on the Commodores, Earth, Wind, and Fire, and, if they were especially cool, Parliament-Funkadelic, to one of its suburbs, where it was pretty much all Aerosmith, all the time. That's a bit of an exaggeration (there was some "Free Bird" and some Led Zeppelin), but only a small one. To me, Aerosmith just sounded harsh and untalented. And because my parents styled themselves as transgressive, I didn't get the whole rebel thing that was so central to rock 'n' roll's appeal. I figured that had ended when the generation before my parents' stopped obsessing about Elvis's hips and the Beatles' haircuts.But after a few years in this new environment, I became more interested in the electric guitar, in part for the strange comfort of its distorted hum and in part because of the power it seemed to hold over masses of people. That power was undeniable in the performance footage of the great arena bands of the seventies (I remember The Kids Are Alright being particularly compelling), and as I had seen up close, though in a smaller way, among my new neighbors. Slowly I became a convert.I eventually went so far as to get an Aerosmith album, Live Bootleg, the album that was released that first summer I was in South Windsor. I remember the stories about someone's brother's friend who had a special edition, one on which the wine stains pressed into the cover were real. I bought it used, and I guess I listened to it a fair amount. I only realized that when, prompted by Dazed and Confused, I picked up another copy. I found that I remembered all of Steven Tyler's incoherent stage patter and where the firecrackers went off during "Toys in the Attic," "Mama Kin," and the other songs from the July 4th Indianapolis show, and I was surprised that "Back in the Saddle" didn't skip where expected it to skip (an expectation heightened by the song's staccato verses, which already sounded like it was skipping).But the great surprise was how much I actually enjoyed the album. I hadn't thought about Aerosmith as anything other than the reformed shadow of their original selves in nearly twenty years. I had forgotten how much rawer, dumber, and more perfect they had once been. I had forgotten how much fun the versions of some of the lesser known songs, like "Sick as a Dog" and "Chip Away at the Stone," had been. I had forgotten about their guitar sounds, which ranged from toys to poorly maintained machinery, but never quite reached those of a musical instrument. They really had been the essence of rock 'n' roll for a few years. It's impossible to convey the picture in my teenage mind of what it must have been like for them to play a stadium show, the picture I created in my mind to go with the live albums I listened to. This was before MTV came along and eventually ended the mystery, and it was long before I actually got to a stadium show myself and destroyed any lingering illusions.So, yeah, I guess listening again to Live Bootleg I did fall prey to nostalgia after all, but it was nostalgia at one extra remove. All nostalgia is a longing for something that never actually happened, but most of the time those suffering the nostalgia remember it as having happened. My nostalgia is for something I know never happened, but I long for it just the same. If I were to somehow find myself at the Aerosmith show in Indianapolis on the Fourth of July, 1977, I would hate everything about it, but I'd love to go to the version of that show that I imagine when I hear that record.