Beat it! Mute Dog

By the time I got into high school I prided myself on being a rock and roll aficionado. I always had the latest hard rock (the term heavy metal was being used a lot more and I liked that despite the pans RollingStone magazine was giving the genre) and the harder the better. The first couple of Def Leappard albums had hit the scene and Let It Rock was my new anthem. I would take my tape of High and Dry to the weight room after school or in the locker room of the football team and crank it. People would come up and ask “who is that?” and I’d say Def Leppard. One of the senior varsity football players said is sounded more like Mute Dog. That pissed me off: this coming from a guy who spent far too much time standing around the weight room stereo rocking out to Pat Travers’ one good song. I just gritted my teeth and did another set on the bench press. Pyromania came out soon after that like a blazing left hook and dropped the nay sayers like a sack of Mute Dog shit. Boom, Boom, out go the lights indeed.

I became the guy my friends would all ask the rock and roll questions. I was even getting into the old stuff like psychedelia, music from the summer of love and Bob Dylan. I was also kind of a teen aged philosopher at times which accounts for my major attachment to bands like Rush and Yes. But I saw U2 as a new wave band and was not ready to go “preppy”. I’d hear bands like Fastway, The Headpins, and Ratt on KZEL when they were just hitting the airwaves and I ran out to buy the tapes. Ratt took a long time to get known anywhere but on my cassette player it seemed to me. The Headpins crashed and burned then came back a year or more later and tried it again with the same album. I had bought it the first time around and had already worn it out. (see how cool I was?) Then something happened that made me stop in my tracks. Eddie Van Halen played a guitar solo on a Michael Jackson record. “What the!?!? Hey wait. This is kinda cool.”