gaming and music have been connected since the first 2112-based D7D campaign, the first Bolt Thrower album, the first time that you and your misfit friends sat in a basement with books and dice with *that band* that someone just discovered on the tape deck and started hashing out characters.
for everyone it's different.
me, i remember the bootleg tape. Sam got it from Greg, our resident metalhead. they were interested in the same girl, who i'd introduced them to, and we were trying not to let the voiced and suppressed jockeying for position affect our friendship. in a time of third-party calls on corded phones, parents that might overhear or listen in with the mute button pressed, and middle school idiocy shadowing half of the opinions and decisions we made, the basement was our freedom. sam's parents were particularly lax, and let us have the run of their large house. i was at Sam's house, we'd gotten off the phone with Greg, and called this girl that Sam knew. he put on some music, and i heard it for the first time.
"I remember now..."
i don't remember the conversation. Lisa was younger than us, Sam knew her from a BBS (before the internet was a thing), and i didn't know that this girl we talked to about maybe starting a D&D game next month (Sam would DM) would be the other person to help talk Greg out of suicide the following year, become my best friend and most trusted confidant for a couple years, resent me going off to college, and end up marrying one of my friends. all i knew was that Sam was being a bit of a jerk, Greg had given him new music, and i wanted a copy of this album.
The game never ran. i remember running something else the next year, at lunch, at one of the big corner tables with eight players, realizing that it was too many. that year, we also did regular D&D nights with the whole group, Sam and Greg and Ben and Jon (who i knew in preschool as "Jon the Bad Boy" and who thought about proposing to Lisa in high school... ) and who knows who else. we'd put on music, and Greg with his older brother bringing home new stuff all the time, he was our leader in the sonic explorations. i kept more to classics (we'd play im my basement and listen to my dad's old Zeppelin records, or The Doors, or Jethro Tull), to the ever-relevant Rush, or to nothing. until Greg gave me a copy of Operation Mindcrime.
Queensryche had softened a bit, gotten radio play and a video or two. Jet City Woman had opened up the Empire album and changed their image, and even the girls in our class who tolerated neither us nor our music liked Silent Lucidity. but Mindcrime was something else. it was the opening bass riff of Jet City Woman, the operatic nature of Silent Lucidity, the unrest of Empire (which i only heard later), and the narrative of a future i could not imagine.
i'd been precocious, particularly with reading. i'd read 1984 when i was 11, five years after it hadn't happened. i knew dystopia. i just wasn't prepared for the proximity it had, or the feeling of anxiety when considering it real. Greg became focused on all the wrong things -- he thought it was cool that Mary was such an edgy character, enjoyed the blasphemous nature of her Nunhood, and the deranged, brainwashed narrator killing the Priest who saved and abused her. he wouldn't listen to it when he went to the catholic version of sunday school that led up to confirmation -- something Greg did, as well as going to a catholic high school, despite all rebellious indications otherwise. something Sam didn't get a chance to do, his bike accident happening the day after the cookout they threw for that year's confirmation class before the year began.
we never finished a game. i lost a whole bunch of gaming stuff (a couple books, a few miniatures, a set of dice, nothing really important) because of a falling-out Sam and i had before he went to a private school. it was over a girl, or many, including Lisa and all the trash he talked about her. it was about him moving on and wanting to make a clean break, about him and i competing for the same girl that he and Greg were posturing about before (and that went poorly for all of us). it was about him being a guy that age and the rest of us not knowing how we fit into our skins. Greg became too much to deal with after a while, using threats of suicide as attention seekers after that one night he was serious and he knew we'd catch him before he fell. Jon the Bad Boy became a serious and stable guy who i went to a charter school with years later. others i have no idea.
and i forgot.
it's really easy to forget about middle school. it's a time when you're a space alien, a jerk, and an adult all rolled into one giant homronally stupid ball. it's really easy to forget being excited about the new Mtv video when you haven't seen music videos on television for years. it's really easy to frget the feeling you got, once, in a friend's basement, listening to a bootleg tape, hearing something... significant.
i don't remember the first D&D game i played, six years old and mybrother running me through a module in the old red book. i vaguely remember the girls down the street wanting to play, sitting in the stuffy tent-camper, realizing that they wanted something else out of the game and that it wasn't what i expected, realizing later that that was the last time one of them was my friend before boys and cheerleading and trying hard to impress other people made me an easy target for her. i don't remember all the stupid things i did, even the ones i was aware of. but i remember feeling like it all was part of something bigger, and that if i was only able to wait it out and endure that i'd see the other side.
26 years later. i'm married. my son is smart for being not-quite-two and my wife and i both remember how lonely it was being smarter, but aren't worrying yet. our game together of choice is Exalted, though we most recently played in a Pathfinder game for parents that included brunch. i actually met her for the first time during a Call of Cthulhu game her boyfriend was in, actually talked to her in the Planescape game her boyfriend ran later... my character was the child of a Kitsune. years later, she left offerings of sake to Inari when we wanted a child. life has ways of looping. Sam is dead, killed in a bike accident on his way to work. i missed the cookout for the confirmation class, being at training for a summer camp job, so i wasn;t even one of the last to see him alive, we didn't reconnect. his best friend was with me at the training (he was the reason i was even there -- it was his uncle who needed help. that night, instead of being where we were supposed to be, we snuck out and met up with a girl i knew whose explorer post was camping, and that was a spectacularly bad idea all around) had a nervous breakdown that only joining the Marines solved, the fallout from his grief and instability peppering my high school years with his bursts of temper and culminating in a near-fatal car accident that might have been deliberate. the camp was insignificant. the girl turned out to be unimportant, but later got Lisa fired from a job. my wife never met any of these people, except Lisa in passing once, on our way out of a bar, another old friend, another member of the Brute Squad that became my friends in college notes. some i haven't seen in over a decade, some i miss, some i'm facebook friends with and all (or how little) that entails. my son will probably not know any of these people, stories that i might not tell him, that i might even forget again well before he's old enough to ask.
last summer, i found a copy of Operation Mindcrime. just as it all comes back to the main character, it also all came back to me. i remembered every note. i remembered the solos, the words, the feel. only... now, after the Bush 00s recreated the fear and the heirarchies and the oppressiveness of the Reagan 80s, i had a new perspective. looking at a world that absolutist, that corroded, suddenly seemed like commentary over shock-value. considering the movement of the story, the character changes, the effects that each song lends to the overall narrative, the album feels very much like a rock opera.
there's some missed potential in it. the duet between Nikki and Mary in the middle of the album should have been a focus. at least one song feels somehow cheap, or less, or just off from what would have made it perfect -- The Needle Lies seems to have been done with metal-single in mind, not movement or tone, for instance. but other moments contain little details that my preteen mind never considered. and after it all, i can only think of a few easy changes -- Times Square is no longer a seedy place... the government-funded wars are in the Middle East, cell phones... but more similarities than differences.
i'll be reviewing the whole album, song by song. i'll compare it to things that matter, me as a boy, me today. i'll give it a voice in the world as it is. as i listened, last summer, i heard something greater than the sum of its parts, and i need to be able to explain exactly why it resonates.
