More Than A Feeling

When I was in high school, my friends and I had a curious set of parameters to judge our relative coolness. I say "relative" since we were in band together - not "a band", mind you, that would have been pretty cool. Nope. I mean we were in marching band together - as in "One time at band camp..." This is why we made special effort to keep our macho moments and peak experiences carefully catalogued for easy reference, as our manhood was regularly questioned. For this reason, the Hollywood depiction of "nerd sex" seems utterly appropriate. The guys I hung out with were semi-major horndogs, primarily for their own self-esteem. Come to think of it, there aren't too many other things on the minds of high school boys of any stripe, but it seemed particularly important for us to assert ourselves as males to help cut down some of the noise about "guys in band."
That aside, we also took our music seriously too. When we weren't marching to rigid tempos and formations attached to "Send in the Clowns" and "Star Wars", we liked to rock. Back in 1979, there wasn't much that rocked harder than Boston's second album, "Don't Look Back." Van Halen, AC/DC and their late seventies brethren were a font of testosterone for us. This was hard rock - a precursor to "hair metal" that flourished in the early eighties. We all read about what a perfectionist Tom Scholz was, and we told ourselves that this was what made them so special - it was all about the music. When they hit Denver in 1979, we had to be there to see if they could pull it off live. "I saw Boston LIVE," we repeated as a mantra for weeks after the show, our tour shirts faded quickly due to frequent wear. When they came back through Colorado, they landed in Boulder's Folsom Field we were there. "I saw Boston LIVE - TWICE!" For a short while, sophomore girls slipped to second place on our list of priorities.
I've been thinking of those shows a lot since Brad Delp took off for that flying guitar in the sky. I don't think about sophomore girls quite as much, and it's been such a long time since I marched in a line - but,
I can tell there's no more time left to criticize
I've seen what I could not recognize
Everything in my life was leading me on
But I can be strong, oh yes I can