Unusual tastes

A funny thing hit me yesterday as I was sitting on a café terrace (only place I can get internet) having just uploaded my blips and absent-mindedly scrolling through my Twitter feed. And here it is time for me to make a very public confession and out myself.

For many years now, I have had these yearnings which make me different from a lot of other people. It’s something inside of me – something I have tried continually to fight – but have been unable. At times it has left me depressed – maybe depressed is the wrong word, perhaps ‘sad’ would be better. My wife knows all about it, and accepts it: we just don’t talk about it; it’s just there, a yawning chasm between us. My son doesn’t know yet; the signs are probably there to see, but he is too young to pick up on them and understand; while he is at school, I’ll keep it from him. I don’t want him to have to ‘deal with’ any of my baggage, I’m sure he’ll eventually have plenty of his own. People often don’t understand ‘difference’ and you know how cruel other kids can be. I don’t want him to have to deal with having a freaky father until he is old enough to understand. I am, you see, a Sammy Hagar fan.

I suppose it dates back from high school, when I was struggling to find an identity and would hang my hat on anything new that came along. My good friend Steve Sefton and I used to lend each other albums (taking them to school in a Penny Lane Records bag to show the girls from Aigburth Vale school how cool we were as we walked by them on Aigburth Road). One of the albums he lent me was All Night Long, Hagar’s excellent live LP on RED VINYL. I can still remember the feeling of listening to it for the first time, sitting there watching the record spin (did I mention it was on red vinyl?) as he ran through “Red”, “Space Station No. 5”, “Bad Motor Scooter”, &c. Music can do many things to you, and in this case, it took me away from 1980 Liverpool to sunny California, where there were beautiful women, no Tories, endless sunshine, and the sound of surf crashing onto golden beaches. To my credit, I gave the record back – but I recorded it on two separate cassettes and went down to Penny Lane Records myself the next day to buy a copy. It’s been a long time since I played the RED VINYL, but I still listen to the odd song when it comes on the random play of my iTunes feed.

Not long after that, Sammy Hagar came to the Liverpool Empire (with April Wine, I think, as support), and somehow Steve and I got front row tickets. It remains one of the greatest concerts of all time. (A while ago I made a trite observation that Sliced Bread’s Cumberland Tavern stands were the best gigs I had been too; now I am out of the closet, I can proudly reinstate Hagar to the pantheon.) For a while, I would wear as much red as I could in homage to “The Red Rocker” and I even had a pair of skin tight red cords. This, you will appreciate, was not that exactly common in early 1980s Liverpool. But who cared, I was living the dream! Me and my red cords were on a mission.

A couple of years later, I developed a social conscience and took issue with Hagar’s pro-Reagan politics (he named one of his LPs VOA FFS). I eventually moved away from my red cords too and when he joined Van Halen, I stopped paying attention for a while (with the exception of the first album 5150, didn’t like much of the Van Halen collaboration at all; IMO, he’s at his best when he’s powering through the blues in a lower register.) (Having said that, if I were capable of making millions out of a record, I’d sing which ever way the public wanted too.)

And then, by chance, I was at a party and got given some tequila. By chance, it was Sammy Hagar’s own brand, and that made me nostalgic (not so much for the cords but for the body that could fit into them) and I checked out one of his later post-VH albums, which I liked a lot. And suddenly I was ploughing my way through his back catalogue again, learning the name of his new guitarist, and occasionally singing “Young Girl Blues” in the shower. I haven’t started dressing like him again, though; there are limits.

Anyway, back to the thrust of this blip, for indeed there is one. As I was skimming through my tweets, I saw to my amazement that Sammy Hagar had turned 75. Seventy-frigging-five. He’s still making music though, and opened a cantina in Mexico where he can invite Lou Rosenthal to play and pretend he’s Dave Lloyd, singing the Cadbury’s Flake advert at the Cumberland Tavern.

***
As you might have been able to tell from the earlier, I had another shortened sleep. I think this one was long enough to allow me to function though (5 hours), so I am optimistic about getting some writing done. Not writing 850-word sections of a blip would help, of course, but what would I be without procrastination? Best not imagine that.
Had a longish walk on the beach in the morning – glorious to have it almost to myself. Just a few locals walking their dogs, and the sound of the sea.