I always love a nice trip down memory lane. Usually this involves a TV show or movie that I watched as a kid or young teen, but occasionally it moves into my young teen music years. I really wasn’t a full-fledged glam metal addict until about 1987. Specifically I moved from a passion for Super 8 home movies into heavy metal cassette tapes. Come to think of it, there was a never a time when some form of media didn’t occupy my obsessive nature. But I digress.
Technically I enjoyed some metal before 1987, but by that year I has all but shirked all traditional radio pop. In 1984 (when I was collecting 45rpm records…ha!), I was into the top 40 music (which I still find to be outstanding during that era) and once in a while a ‘metal’ song would creep onto the charts. In this case, I’m talking about the song by RATT called Round and Round, a catchy little metallic ditty if there ever was one. It actually reached #12 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts.
And naturally, it was downhill from there. I wasn’t the biggest of RATT fans, but I did enjoy several of their other singles too: Back for More, Lay It Down, You’re in Love, Slip of the Lip, and Way Cool Jr. This took us to 1988, which proved to be about the life cycle for luckiest of glam metal bands of the 1980’s. Naturally they made a few more albums, the latest in 2010, but who’s heard of them?
But whether or not I was still following RATT by June 28, 2014, at the Days of the Dead event in Indianapolis, Indiana, when I got the opportunity to meet their most famous lead singer Stephen Pearcy, made no difference. They had already burrowed their way into my brain like good little rats, and there was no chance I was going to pass this encounter up.
He had a very telling pricing structure. It was only $10 for an autographed photo (indicating somewhat of a has-been status), but was an additional $20 for a picture with him (indicating the fact that he knew an encounter with him would make an incredibly cool Facebook post, which was the first thing I did when I got home).
Stephen Pearcy was a pretty cool guy and nice enough to pose for a picture with Carolyn for free as part of the deal. So I gladly shelled out what he was asking. There was certainly no point in going round and round about it…
Celebrity encounters from the 2014 Indianapolis Days of the Dead event will continue…
Leave a Reply