We Are All In This Together

I once got into a fight over Ozzy Osbourne. I was in fifth grade and earlier in that same year I had an epiphany the first time I saw Quiet Riot's "Come On Feel the Noise" on MTV. A light bulb went off in my head and something said "this is it!". I had discovered heavy metal and it would change my life. I quickly expanded from Quiet Riot to include more of the heavy weight metal artists of the day(and still today) like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Ozzy Osbourne.

One day I was walking home from school and these two "trendy" kids started giving me a hard time. My memory of the incident isn't exactly clear but it turned into us insulting each other over music. I might have told them that "Simon LeBon was a fag," (Duran Duran was the hot trendy band at the time) and they came in with "Ozzy sucks". I wasn't having that and it soon turned to blows, with those two guys against little ol' me. Lucky for my skinny underweight ass, the fight broke out a couple doors from my house and my older brother raced out and beat those two kids up.

It seems funny now looking back that I got into a fight to defend Ozzy, especially with what his image had become courtesy of his wife and MTV. But back then Ozzy was God to all self-respecting metalheads!

I did get the last laugh a few years later. It must have been in 8th or 9th grade and I had to go to the locker room to get something after school. It was pretty much deserted with the exception of two guys (yup, you guessed it, the same two I had fought) who were in there blasting Blizzard Of Ozz. God, I love hypocrites.

Another incident I will never forget occurred in the fall of my 8th grade year. I was riding my bike home through a shortcut in the dried up riverbed near my house when I ran into "Hammer". Hammer was an older kid, must have been 17 at the time, but he was huge with really long hair and we all looked up to him. He was like the king of the metalheads in our town. I remembered how proud I was the day he gave me a nickname; "mini-metalhead". Yeah, it seems lame now, but back them when the older kids I looked up to called me that, it was a sign of acceptance and a badge of honor.

So I walked my bike along with Hammer and he told me that I needed to gather up all the "rockers" at the Jr. High and have them meet in the parking lot of the high school at 3:00 o'clock on Tuesday because we were gonna beat the sh*t out of the football team. (metalheads in my town were known as "rockers" in those days).

I was really into reading "The Outsiders" at that age, since I readily identified with the "greaser" characters of the book. So there we were about to have our own "rumble". I was excited and raced to school on Monday and told all my friends to be there! Our honor was at stake. What happened was on the previous Friday, one of our crowd, a guy named Robert Maze, was sucker punched by a jock in the lunch line at the high school. When he went to fight the guy back, all his jock friends jumped in and you can figure out the rest.

The closing bell rang on Tuesday and I meet up with all of my friends in front of the school. There were about 20 of us and we grabbed our bike chains, ready to rumble. We walked over to the high school (about three blocks away) and once we got there, we beheld a site I'll never forget. The large parking lot was filled with metalheads. There must have been at least 200, if not more, metalheads there ready to teach the jocks a lesson. Rockers came from miles around to join in, some as far away as Long Beach (about 20 miles from where we were at). The jocks didn't stand a chance and their coach obviously agreed because he quickly high-tailed the team into the locker room and called the cops.

Once the cops got there, we dispersed peacefully, but the jocks learned a lesson that day; you don't mess with the rockers. And that's the main point of why I am writing this.

We are all in this together. I know for me personally music has been a defining element in my life, ever since I caught the bug way back when from that Quiet Riot video (thanks to Kevin and the crew for starting me on my journey). A lot of my friends, I know through music in one shape or another. It's part of who I am and sets me apart from the "regular" people out there, even today.

Most people think of music as simply entertainment, they go from trend to trend without any thought. But I know a lot of our regular readers are like me, music to them is much more than background noise or catchy jingles on the radio. It's a part of their makeup; who they are.

Let's face it, that's what brings a lot of us together here at antiMUSIC. We may come from totally different walks of life, live under different socio-economic backgrounds, even our politics are vastly varied from one person to the next, from hardcore communist to hard-line libertarians. But we all share a common bond which keeps us coming back day after day and interacting with each other here at this little corner of cyberspace. Despite the anonymous nature of pen-names or words on the screen, a lot of us have gotten to know each other from our visits here. And it was all born out of a love for music, that was the defining factor that has brought us together in much the same way that it brought hundreds of rockers together that day long ago in that parking lot to defend the honor of our friend.

Some people have paid the ultimate price for that love of music. That's the heart of what I am writing about here today. It's been five years since the tragic nightclub fire in Rhode Island claimed the lives of a hundred people at a Great White concert. These were die-hard fans of hard rock, not your run of the mill trendy concertgoers. Let's be honest, Great White hadn't been in the limelight for some time, so those who payout the money to see them perform are the hardcore fans. While their contemporaries sat at home watching TV or went to the trendy nightspots to dance, they were out at concerts keeping the form of music they loved alive.

We're not here to talk about blame for why they lost their lives. Sure, it wasn't a great idea to use pyro in such a small club and it sure as hell wasn't a great idea for the club owners to line the walls with highly flammable "packing foam" for soundproofing. That's not the point of this article; the lawyers will sort that out eventually.

The point is, anyone of us could have just as easily met the same fate as the hundred we lost that night. I know most of our regular readers aren't typically the same as those who would attend a Great White concert, but we do have a lot in common with those who did on that fateful night, February 20th, 2003.

What happened in Rhode Island could just as easily happen at any number of small clubs all over the world. I know I've been to my fair share of "firetraps" to see concerts, especially from underground bands. I know most of you have too. And chances are thtat the thought of something like the fire that happened at The Station happening at one of our favorite music clubs has never even occurred to us. It must have been the same for those there that night. They just went out to see a band they loved perform.

That night a few hundred people, who love a brand of hard rock that isn't exactly in fashion, ventured out for a night of fun and music. Many of them have been to that club before for numerous concerts. While the kids they grew up with, who followed the trends, most likely grew out of the music years ago, something about the music lit a spark in those who attended the show that they never let go of and they never traded their Great White CD's in for Celine Dion. Change Great White for your favorite band and you can see where I'm coming from.

This tragedy should really hit home for all of us who really love music. It doesn't matter if we are fans of that brand of rock or not, it could have happened at any show. This personally touched me because I did know the band member who died in the fire, although I readily admit not well.

Ty Longley wanted one thing above all in life, to make music. He was a genuinely good guy and carried himself in a lighthearted manor. When you first met him, he made you feel like you've known him for years; he was so at ease with people and always full of humor. I know the last thing he would have wanted to do was hurt his fans. He was living out his dream by playing with Great White and looking forward to getting home to start a family with his pregnant girlfriend Heidi. His is just one story among the hundred that can be told about those who perished in the fire simply because they loved a form of music. I'm not trying to make them out to be heroes who died for rock n roll, but in a way they are.

As the anniversary of the tragedy passed each year, I reflect back on the little time I spent with Ty and am grateful to have known him. I know those who knew the 100 hundred people who died in the fire are still morning their death. A lot are playing the "what if" game and wishing that the fateful night had never occurred. But we can't turn back time and make it all go away.

What we can do, is never forget those who died that night. They lost their lives because they were true believers that loved a certain form of music or they wouldn't have been there. If you had the chance to ask them if they would be willing to die for the music, the answer would most likely be no, but all of us who venture out to small clubs for live music may also be taking that chance every single time we enter the door to hear a band play.

We are all in this together because of the music. It binds us in a way that those who don't share that love will never understand. Whether it's punk, metal, hardcore, 80's hard rock or nu-metal, we may listen to different music but we all share the same respect and love for the music that connects with us at a deep level of our beings. It sounds cheesy, but there really is no other way to describe it. I'm sure for a lot of those who went to the Station that night to see Great White it was the same way. It was the same thing that brought all our rocker friends together that one Tuesday afternoon to defend our friend's and our honor.

We saw a similar sacrifice with the senseless murder of Dimebag and a few fans that either tried to help or got caught in the crossfire. The same can be said of those at the Damageplan show and Dimebag as those we lost in the Rhode Island fire. They paid the ultimate sacrifice for their love of the music. And music does bring us together. Only a month had passed and Dime's brother Vinnie Paul gave of himself and attended a benefit concert for Raven's Heart Foundation. You see, Raven's parents are diehard metal fans and when their newborn daughter was born with a heart condition, the metal community rallied together in support. Eighteen months after I wrote the original version of this article I got to see once again a demonstration of the main theme; that in the end, music does bind us together in a way that nothing else can.

So as the anniversary of the tragic fire once again passes, we should all take a moment to remember those who died in this tragic fire. Though we may not have ever met any of them, in many ways they were our friends. We should never forget them.