We’d Touched Greatness.
After meeting famous rock stars on our spring break in Chicago while all the other college students went to Florida and danced in the sun, Bonnie and I believed we’d reached a sort of holier-than-thou status. We’d touched greatness; our lives would never be the same.
We spent the last few months of my junior year staring at The Firm poster on Bonnie’s dorm wall, listening to the album, crying and reliving the moments. We hung out at the sorority house where there was a TV, watching MTV from morning until night hoping for a glimpse of the band’s video for Radioactive. When the video came on – just a three-minute clip of the band playing – we would scream like they could hear us. We absorbed and memorized every note, facial expression and movement for the entire video.
When MTV announced the release of The Firm’s second video, Satisfaction Guaranteed, we were elated. We camped out at the sorority house waiting for it to play. (This wasn’t necessary, since MTV provided the exact hour it premiered.) When it finally started, Bonnie and I got deathly quiet, staring at the screen, waiting to see … something new.
The video was a huge disappointment: a mash of hot, sweaty people standing around and the band sweating along with them. The video showcased Jimmy’s ability to play his guitar with both a beer bottle and a violin bow, things he’d done in his Led Zeppelin years.
I suppose this is impressive if you’re not looking for the guys you met in some random bar in Chicago. But Tony – the bass player and Bonnie’s tryst – was barely featured and Phil, the road manager, was certainly nowhere to be seen.
Even Jimmy looked wrong. When we’d met him, Jimmy was sullen, eyes glazed over, no one inside. He was wasted, grumpy, almost mean, slumped and slurring his words. In the video Jimmy is fun, a legend, a bit of a trickster with a gleam in his eye.
Decades later, I saw Jimmy Page on TV. By then he only barely resembled the guy we met in the bar.
In 1985, Jimmy was drinking heavily and chain smoking. He looked like a puppy in a downpour waiting to drown. Jimmy has since given up all substances – alcohol and cigarettes included. Decades older now, being clean gives Jimmy a youthful countenance unlike anything we saw in 1985. He looks and sounds like a completely different person – upbeat and smiling and engaged in life.
But in 1985, he was just a guitar legend that had temporarily dropped down to earth and spent a few hours near Bonnie and me. We started to believe we weren’t ever going to be right again – although we didn’t know what it would entail to make our “new” lives whole. We felt like we’d experienced mind-blowing astral projection when all we did was party with strangers in Chicago.
College wasn’t the same. Parties on campus weren’t the same. Hanging with our friends wasn’t the same. We thought we might die of heartbreak, even though there was no love involved. We were starstruck teenagers on a mission to regroup with a rock band we randomly found in a bar.
So it was fortunate when, that very summer, Bonnie and I found them again. But first, I had to finish my junior year of college.