Do You Wanna Get Rocked?

Part 2

We got out alive from Def Leppard at the State Fair. That alone is worth the price of admission. Syracuse is not known to be a city to hang around after dark if you don’t have a roof or door. We headed out of town as fast as we could.

Cortland has become a popular SUNY school since the NY Jets established the training camp there. These days, Cortland is a pleasant little college town. This was not the case in 1999. Even after the afternoons spent in bookstores and cafes, and a handful of kickass roller derby bouts, in my mind, Cortland is still the little dump of a town where the Greyhound dropped off passengers in a dirt parking lot. I played a lot of Warhammer in Cortland, and if the table wasn’t so good, I wouldn’t be seen there. Good job, revitalizing, Cortland!

The night we saw Def Leppard at the State Fair it was still Dump Town. The trip should have taken an hour, but we’d been trapped in traffic as the concert crowd dispersed into the hills. We stopped at a Denny’s on the outskirts of Cortland that has since been leveled for a new diner. Dr. Filth wanted McDonald’s, but I was driving. For some reason, Wendy’s still didn’t take credit cards. Cortland had nothing else back then.

There wasn’t much to talk about in the show. They were Def Leppard. They played those songs we knew from the radio. They might as well have been the radio, every song was so perfect. A theatre professor in college insisted the Rolling Stones pre-recorded their shows, could it be Def Leppard did the same?

I re-discovered the band on a whim recently, and am a little embarrassed to admit how much I’ve been listening. Not just the cassettes I had, like Hysteria, and Pyromania, or Adrenalize, which was one of the first CDs I ever purchased. The following year, that store in the mall couldn’t stock enough Slayer for me.

I feel silly now singing along to lyrics that are absurdly sexual, usually only do so on the highway.  There I can roll the windows down and emote without anyone being subjected to me or Joe Elliot. Back then, I never picked up on the innuendo. The peaches and cream were right there in front of me, and I had no idea what any of that could mean. I’m more surprised I didn’t get it when I was 20 and had only one thing on my mind. When I was 10, all I needed was the Rock, and Def Leppard brought it hard.

Concluded tomorrow