"...if you're a young, impressionable person and pop music is your religion, the gospel can be a little arbitrary and dangerous."

-Scott Miller, Loud Family

I came across the above snippet while continuing my perusal of the 'Ask Scott' segment of the excellent Loud Family website.

The quote excited me 'cos earlier today, after a brief email exchange with my ex co-guitarist about guitars we lust after, I reflected on how little our mutual obsession with music has changed since our high school days.

Back then, our band and our music existed in an entirely separate realm from school. I don't think we shared much about one with the other, so now, twenty years beyond that first 'paying' gig we ever had and our recent reunion show, I am looking at all of us and wondering how much, really, has changed.

Sure, there are kids and houses and marriages and stuff in the time between, but we're still all about as smart-assed to each other as we were back then (albeit a little less sharp-tongued and acid).

And, I'm surprised to realize, we're all still as passionate about music as we were then.

When I realized that, I immediately remembered, from some previously uncharted fold of my brain, sitting at a desk that another classmate of mine (John Meyers, by name - a name I've probably not considered in the twenty-plus years since I left high school) had painstakingly penciled a good 'AC/DC' logo, surrounded by the titles of each of the songs from 'Back In Black'. I remember admiring the dedication that showed, the obsessive zealotry - even though I detested the band (in retrospect, a feeling I realize came more from my distaste for their high-school fans, a mix of heshers and 'cool' kids who helped make that era one of my more unpleasant. Now I love AC/DC so much that I actually badly paraphrased old William Carlos Williams and wrote somewhere else that "'so much/depends on/the hesitancy/of Bon Scott's/growl/in the middle of 'Jailbreak'").

Now I think of that fellow, John Meyers, and I wonder if he remains an AC/DC fan. Does he teach his children the lyrics of the songs as doggerel (as I did with Ramones and Captain Beefheart for my own son)? Has he purchased new copies of "Back In Black" to replace the old ones as they wore out or became technologically outdated?

I've got to believe not.

I've got to, in turn, applaud ourselves, for stumbling across a belief when we were pimply-faced kidlets and inadvertently holding it close for the two-score plus years since.