Today marks the 30th anniversary of my purchase of Van Halen’s final album with David Lee Roth, “1984.” On cassette.
I was nearly 12, and freshly loosed into the hothouse of puberty; the psychic gulag of junior high loomed at the terminus of yet another endless summer, and Van Halen was a sonic salvo. This was the year Orwell thought would be such a drag, and yet here was some scissor-kicking, oversexed rodeo clown with a belting baritone and a blond mane that hung down to his bare-bottomed chaps. David. Lee. Roth. Big Brother wasn’t watching us. He was covering his eyes.
Fast forward to the last song on side one, “Drop Dead Legs.” This is the big-bottomed walk-down that ably secures Roth’s status as the poet laureate of ’80s hard rock. The lyrics don’t sound “written” so much as improvised upon the notion of a woman’s legs, which, despite the song’s title, rate only a single mention. From this thesis statement, Roth digresses into a surreal monolog that references the undead, dentition and a beloved Depression-era cartoon character. Sure, the lyrics don’t make any sense on the page but in the ear… Actually, they don’t make any sense there either. But Roth made it sound convincing.
The entire second stanza should be put through the Enigma machine – I suspect that lines like …
Dig those moves … Vampire.
Set me loose, get it higher
Throw my rope, loop-de-loop
Nice white teeth. Betty Boop.
… might actually be cipher for the Meaning of Life. Or at least the meaning of middle school. Worked at the time.
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In unrelated news, those who have spent any time drinking with me have heard me opine, “two is coincidence, three is synchronicity.” I mean this in the Jungian, not The Police way. Today’s synchronistic phenomena comes courtesy of Mick Foley, the World Wrestling Entertainment legend-turned-author and raconteur.
First, whilst trawling for items, I discovered an emailed press release sent months ago. It was for an event at which Foley was scheduled to appear, called Eternal. It purported to be a Long Island-based comic book convention, but sounded like a synonym for “endless scam.” Next, I spied an old poster for the wrestlers’ appearance last month at Petaluma’s Phoenix Theater. There, he apparently unleashed a “blend of wit and wisdom, wildness and warmth…” and presumably other words beginning with W. I don’t know - I didn’t go (if I’m going to be alone in a crowd, I like to do it where my dentition would be less under threat).
Finally, I was at Treehorn Books in Santa Rosa, perusing the used stacks, only to find Foley’s toothless grin beaming back at me from the cover of, “Foley is Good and the Real World is Faker than Wrestling.” I’m not sure if that’s even grammatically correct, but then, he’s a New York Times bestseller and I’m not (thus he handily wins the “descriptivist” versus “prescriptivist” linguistic debate). Now, I’m inspired – nay, compelled! – to score an interview. I’ll print it here if it transpires.
Meanwhile, whilst researching “Foley,” I discovered this: Folie à deux (French for “a madness shared by two, or shared psychosis) is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are transmitted from one individual to another.” And so it begins.
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Daedalus Howell spreads delusional beliefs at DHowell.com
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