I’ve blogged in the past about the origins of my music fandom, specifically about my friend with the Chevy Nova and an 8-Track player and some very specific albums I will always associate with him. There was another friend, Howard, who was also responsible for introducing me to a lot of music that I wouldn’t have heard until years later if not for him.
First, I should probably talk a little about Howard, who I lost contact with forty-plus years ago. I met him when we were very young. I now realize that Howard was definitively on the autism spectrum, something that simply wasn’t diagnosed or recognized at the time. He was an odd child, with terrible social skills. In later conversations with adults who knew him when he was little, including my mother, he was thought to be mentally deficient in some way. As a result of this perception, and after not seeing him for a number of years, mom was surprised when Howard became one of my closest friends in high school and for a few years after. Howard was brilliant. He wasn’t an A student or any kind of standout in high school academia – neither was I – but like me, he read a lot, things well beyond the typical interests of teenagers. I remember sitting on our front porch having an intense, pretentious, and no doubt horribly wrong discussion of Nietzsche. Did I mention we were pretentious? I may have been in college by then. If not for my obsessions with comics I might have been insufferable. Which is how most people found Howard. He didn’t have a lot of friends.
He lived about five miles away and we would frequently, in the days before driver’s licenses, ride our bikes to each others houses to hang out. During the spring of tenth grade his dad got a new job and moved the family north, not far, but not a bike ride away anymore. Our friendship continued after he moved and we got old enough to drive, but we were no longer in the same school, so contact was more infrequent.
His family didn’t sell the old house right away, so they allowed Howard to live there, alone, to finish up the school year. His aunt, one of our English teachers, lived nearby to check on him, and it was the 70s... what could go wrong? Miraculously, nothing really did. Miraculously, because we did some dumb shit. Not as much drinking and drugs as you might expect... I did that with other friends. It was the country, so of course he lived in a hunting household with guns. We did a lot of target shooting, which we had done before the parents moved out. I also remember blowing stuff up with pipe bombs made from the gunpowder his dad had for reloading shells. Dumb, dumb shit.
We were both into music, though I think it ultimately meant more to me than it did to him. It seemed like he would listen to something for awhile and then just move on and discard it, which meant I got some of his albums. One night he played Aerosmith’s Rocks album for me and it changed my life. I had heard Dream On and Walk This Way, but Rocks rocked! That same night I heard Electric Light Orchestra’s New World Record for the first time.
Howard was also more adventurous than I was. He would scour the cut-out bins and buy albums for a dollar, things he had never heard and knew nothing about. Through him I heard Rick Derringer’s If I Weren’t So Romantic I’d Shoot You, my first Ramones album, Rocket to Russia, and the Runaways Queens of Noise, where my crush on Cherie Currie began. He bought Cheap Trick’s Heaven Tonight new, and it’s one of the most seminal albums of my teens.
We went to a couple of concerts together, back when Pittsburgh seemed a long way away and dangerous to my country mouse sensibilities. Howard drove, because he was more fearless about that sort of thing than I was at the time. Kansas played the Civic Arena on a Saturday night. We didn’t have tickets and had made no plans to go until that afternoon when, on a whim, he suggested it. We made the drive and luckily there were tickets at the door. The opening act was Mahogany Rush, and don’t remember much about their set. I was excited for Kansas, having owned both Leftoverture and Point of Know Return, but I was disappointed with the concert. They fine, but they were touring in support of their new album, Monolith, which I had never heard, so most of the show was just lost on me. The encore with Carry on My Wayward Son and Dust in the Wind redeemed the evening somewhat.
The other show we saw was Rush, on the Hemispheres tour. Rush was another band Howard had introduced me to, specifically through 2112. Geddy’s voice took awhile to get used to, but for about six albums I was really into them. The opening band, another group Howard had bought on a whim, was Starz. They’re one of those bands that I think should have been bigger than they were. Several really solid rock albums that a lot of 80s musicians – Jon Bon Jovi, Nikki Sixx and Lars Ulrich among them –were influenced by. I liked Starz a lot and for me this was a great double bill. But it was an odd matchup in terms of musical styles. For the most part, the Rush fans at that show were not very gracious or accepting of Starz, booing them through most of their set. They left the stage, and then, maybe by the urging of Rush, or maybe just from sheer arrogance, came back and played an encore, flipping the middle finger to the whole crowd. I loved them for it.
I started college and Howard started working for his dad’s company and we saw less and less of each other and I have no idea exactly when the last time would have been. Certainly well before I went to grad school in 86. Any attempts that I have made to find him online have been unsuccessful, though I did see him mentioned in his mother’s obituary from a number of years ago.
Like anyone from our past, I have no idea how much of this he remembers, or if any of this music is something he still values, or listens to, or associated with me. But, wherever you are, thank you Howard for buying a lot of albums I wouldn’t have and exposing me tho things that continue to bring joy into my life.
