Why is it that you can vividly remember things that happened to you in high school when you can’t even remember what you ate for lunch?
I asked some famous scientists, who told me it’s because at that young age, your brain is still full of sticky memory juice that cements everything to your little gray cells. As you age, the memory juice starts to run out until your brain is finally just dry and dusty and can’t remember anything, including where you just parked your car at the mall.
OK, I made all that up. There is no memory juice and if there were, you couldn’t get it because everyone with more money than you would be gulping it with their Evian water from France.
I bring this up because the aging hair band Deep Purple is coming to the new Long Beach amphitheater on Sept. 11, and it reminded me of the time I saw them as a teenager in the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City. I’d never been to a rock concert before, and certainly not in a huge arena.
My family had recently moved to a small town in northern Utah so my military dad could work at Hill Air Force Base. This was a massive and unwelcome culture shock to me, because we’d been living at Ramey Air Force Base in balmy, tropical Puerto Rico, which at the time was an earthly paradise for American teenagers. All we did was go to school and hang out, swim and surf on some of the world’s most luscious beaches.
Moving to Utah, the shock was indescribable, from the cold, snow and ice to the requirement to wear dresses to school in the cold, snow and ice to the huge high school where I never fit in, being generally a weirdo and not being part of the dominant religion.
A friendless outcast, I discovered the colony of dopers who hung out in front of the indoor swimming pool across from campus, smoking cigarettes and feeling alienated and rebellious.
I didn’t smoke dope or drink much (at least not then) but I did ostentatiously smoke cigarettes and I liked being with people who accepted me, even though I was different. So they became my tribe.
There was nothing for teenagers to do in that little town — not even a movie theater — and my parents didn’t want me to work, because they’d been forced by poverty to work at my age and they wanted to spare me the experience.
So our only Saturday night form of entertainment was getting into my friend Annelle’s souped-up bright yellow Nova and cruising State Street with all the other teenage kids. Remember “American Graffiti” by George Lucas? Yeah, it was like that.
I have never known anything about how cars work, but it sticks in my head that she had a 327 engine in it. Does that mean anything to you? It never did to me. I just sat in the back seat, smoking cigarettes in what I thought was a seductive manner and making eyes at the boys we passed in their souped-up cars.
One of the great pleasures of the night when we would arrive at a red light and the car full of boys next to us would race their engines, signaling their macho virility. And Annelle would respond by racing her engine, which the boys obviously ignored because … we were a car full of girls. Then, the light would turn green and Annelle would blast that Nova out ahead of the boys, showing them that we girls of the female persuasion were not the nitwits they thought we were.
We could do this all night long without ever losing the pleasure of it.
One day, the girls announced that they were going down to Salt Lake City to see Deep Purple at the now-defunct Salt Palace arena. At the time they had the big hit “Smoke on the water” which played endlessly on the radio. I was invited to go along. Somehow I convinced my parents I should be allowed to do this, or maybe I just lied.
That night, when the marijuana joint was passed around, I joined in. And by the time we parked and entered the Salt Palace, I had entered a fifth dimension that I’d never before experienced. I’d never been in such a large building before and within nanoseconds, I lost my friends in the crowd.
I walked around for what seemed like five or six hours looking for them, in a blurry cloud of being. Luckily, I must have had my ticket with me, because finally an usher helped me find my seat. But I never forgot that feeling of lonely and utter disorientation and confusion. I never liked being stoned in public again, although if someone wanted to inject vodka into a watermelon, I was there.
Deep Purple was amazing, as was the experience of being in a huge adoring crowd of other teenagers. It occurred to me to go to the concert in Long Beach but, you know, it’s never the same. I don’t want to see aging rockers come out with their walkers and toupees. (The Rolling Stones are an exception.)
By the way, the Salt Palace arena was torn down in 1994. Now, what was I going to have for lunch?
Want to write me? Hit me up at mfisher@scng.com. I especially like it when you correct my grammar and tell me how wrong I am.