![]() Just wait." The car stopped moving as the extended bridge of Pete Townsend's synthesized wizardry began its flight into the darkness around us. My dad kept saying, "Just wait until the last line. This dispatch from the radio was calling him to a time and place that we had never seen him exist in somewhere he could be lost, unabashedly unguarded, and authentically whole.Īt some point, the music dictated that it needed our full attention, and we pulled over and parked in the grass just off the highway that would take us home. My dad was singing every word to the heavens, and my brothers and I basked in the youth exuding from him. "I'll tip my hat to the new constitution. Whatever this was, it had all the ingredients of a sound and fervor that would sustain me throughout my entire life to come. There were colossal guitar solos, drum fills that felt like live-wires, and tales of defiance and freedom. By the time the chorus came in, the top of the convertible had come down, and the volume knob had been turned to its highest setting our entire atmosphere filled with the wild, emancipated sounds of rock 'n' roll.Īs we drove, the music moved in strange new directions. It was "Won't Get Fooled Again" by the Who, a song released almost 30 years before that night, beaming in over the radio to our four wheels leaving a movie theater parking lot. A full band then came into view-more guitar blasts, a commanding, elusive bassline, and one of the most exuberant drum patterns I still have ever heard. It hung there, a lone strum, while an airy synthesizer began to dance around it in syncopated rhythm. A massive guitar chord rang out into the ether. Whatever song had been playing began to fade, leaving the sound of a light radio hiss in its wake. The engine was turned on, and just as he had left it, the local rock station, 97.7 The Loop, blared from the speakers. I was in the back, directly behind the driver's seat, with my dad at the wheel. I was probably around 9 years old, and my brothers and I were packing into my dad's convertible on a warm summer night.
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