kjpepper | So ya... thought ya... might like to... go to the show?

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Andee who liked to play her siblings' old LPs. She would squirrel away the ones she liked the best and play them in her room on a turntable that had earlier been salvaged from some dark corner of The House, where it had been forgotten, much like the records, for years. She would play them for hours, and they were content to sing again after their owners had grown up and left them behind, and they taught her about music fifteen-twenty years before her time that would be later known as Classic Rock, and up in her room she made friends with the Rolling Stones, The Doors, a random kid that somehow could play pinball really well despite not being able to see or hear, and she heard, in all its furiously guitar heavy wall of sound glory, how Meat Loaf's journey from "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" to "I Would Do Anything for Love" began.

But there was one album of particular note, a story of isolation and sadness and insanity clad in a white double sleeve decorated only with a faint impression of bricks. She'd started out by being fascinated by the pictures revealed when she opened the double album to see the candy colored weirdness drawn emerging from behind the bricks, dominated on the left by a gigantic ass wearing an English barrister's wig. Fascinated by that, she put it on, didn't like it at first, but certain things tugged at her, caught in her young mind, resonated. She ended up putting it down for a while, but coming back to it when the boy she was currently obsessed with mentioned that he had heard and liked the album. This probably made her like it better than she had... and she soon found herself coming back to it, laying on the blue shag carpet of her room midway between her stereo speakers listening for umpteenth time, the story of a ragingly fucked up rock star and his descent into Naziesque megalomania and depression, told through the hiss, clicks and pops of a slightly less than pristine vinyl record that when she finally purchased the album for herself on CD, she found herself missing. She got attached to certain passages: thrilled at the short, triumphant bridge section between "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" (which is probably one of the most sarcastic titles ever) and the iconic declaration about education and thought control and bricks in the wall, squirmed uncomfortably at the long denied resonances of "Mother," was haunted by the quiet beauty of "Goodbye Blue Sky," and the savage honesty of "Don't Leave Me Now", taught herself to play "Nobody Home" on the piano and enjoyed creeping out her friends by delivering pertinent bits of "Comfortably Numb" and "The Trial" in appropriately creepy fashion. She even tracked down and bought herself a copy of the Alan Parker movie and watched it as obsessively she had watched The Princess Bride a few years before.

The album, along with other protracted exercises in musical darkness (NIN's The Downward Spiral in particular) got me through high school. College, I moved on to happier things, and never quite returned to The Wall (for that was the name of the album with which I had been so ferociously obsessed). But one day as I was coming home from CDH after one of my blood draws, the cab driver had his radio tuned very low to the local classic rock station and my ears pricked up on the throbbing guitar line and jarring percussion of "The Happiest Days of our Lives." So I asked him to turn it up before my favorite part of the album started playing, and he did. I didn't realize how much I'd missed The Wall until that moment, hearing that little bit again. And it seems that once again, I'm at a time in my life where I need to listen to it a few times and see if in the decade where the CDs sat in my Case Logic unlistened and the LPs are once again lost in The House, Pink's story has anything new to teach me.

Tonight I have finally pulled out those ancient CDs and imported both of them into iTunes, and as I have done for many nights growing up, plan to start it from the beginning and leave it on softly as I go to sleep, amusingly enough, piped through the same stereo I used to blast it through as a kid. Only unlike every other time I've tried this, due to the magic of mp3s, it won't stop a quarter, or halfway through, it will go right on through to the end. The entire trip, in one shot. I've never heard it like that before. Should be interesting... and I'll probably be a mite disappointed if I don't end up with some very interesting dreams at the end of it all.