I'm not going to pretend that my epiphany led me straight to the whacked out eclectic choices I now enjoy. But it had to start somewhere, right? So I started liking U2 and the Cars as I said, and more of the Power Pop and middle America rock and roll and the occasional pop song. But my exposure was still pretty limited. But also at around this time I started getting bored with the same old heavy metal music...or more accurately I was getting bored with the formula that so many of the new bands were coming up with. The classic 12 bar blues riffs that many of the old hard rock bands and middle American acts like John Mellencamp (still known as John Cougar then) and Bruce Springsteen were offering wore well, but so many of the heavy metal bands seemed to care more for their mascara and nylons and teased hair than the music. Kiss took off their make up and came back just to prove that they still weren't very good at making music. I liked the first couple of Motley Crue songs but that was about it. Heavy metal went into a nasty skid for a couple of years there only to be partially brought back to credibility by Guns and Roses, but even that was more than I could handle. As luck would have it, I moved to La Grande OR.
I was pretty scared of moving there and when I talked to my mom and she said that was going to be our new home I was pretty sure my life was about to end. I had been staying the summer with my best friend in Springfield while my parents and younger sister were in Southeaster Washington and Northeastern Oregon trying to make some money in the "booming" Reagan economy. That wasn't really panning out and they sort of got stuck over there. I was told I had to get on a Greyhound and head over to my new home. My best friend Brian had been hunting over there and recalled that it was a small town filled with cowboys and that I was doomed.
I boarded the Greyhound and sat down. Pretty soon a pretty girl about my age sat down beside me and by the time we got to Portland we had been talking and I think we kind of liked each other. I had one of those Walkman players with two headphone jacks and she plugged in and we listened to Krokus for a while. She loved it. She borrowed it and said she was going to send it back to me. I never saw it or her again. But on the way into town I saw that at least this one horse town had a McDonalds. I was starting to feel a little better because I could see some trees in the mountains and the tumble weeds seemed to have been left about 50 miles back. The first person I saw in La Grande OR, coming out of the town's only McDonalds was wearing a felt Stetson cowboy hat, a western shirt held closed with those pearl colored snaps. Wrangler jeans with a leather belt that probably had his name or nick name engraved along the back, a great big silver belt buckle glaring the hot summer sun back into my eyes, and I swear to Gawd from 200 yards away I could actually see the shit on his cowboy boots. I told the pretty girl I was gonna die (I was probably wearing my muscle shirt with the rising sun picture and Kamikaze written in Japanese on it. My hair was down to the middle of my back. I looked like the rock and roll drummer I dreamed of being and these cowboys were gonna kick my ass.) The pretty girl did not try to comfort me. I think she knew I was dead meat. Maybe that's why she never sent me back my Krokus tape.
But La Grande wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. There were three kinds of kids in that town. The jocks, (and their girlfriends) the stoners (which I sort of looked like) and the "Goat Ropers." (the term the stoners used to describe the cowboys) There was also a college there. And they had a radio station that played all kinds of great music...sometimes. It was this radio station (KEOL) that began opening my mind to more musical posibilities. I was going to put my musicology knowledge to work. I became a college radio disk jockey.
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