Flashback Friday - Cult Classic

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Lyric of the Day:

The heads that turn
Make my back burn ...
The world turns around
The world drags me down ...
The fire in your eyes
Keeps me alive ...
I'm sure in her you'll find
The sanctuary

- The Cult

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I haven't listened to The Cult in probably 13 years. But for whatever reason, they popped in my head about a week ago and wouldn't leave. The strange applications of instruments, drenched in pseudo-mysticism and Native American-meets-metal fronted by one of the most assaultingly knock your socks off voices to ever hit vinyl made them in league with my all-time favorite bands. My Cult CDs were all stolen way back when and I had never replaced them. I decided this sudden reappearance in my mental jukebox was a sign that it was time.

I got my CD today and popped it in the player as I ran errands this afternoon. And as the sitaresque intro to "She Sells Sanctuary" flooded my car, I felt myself suddenly plunge into a springwater sinkhole. I felt as if seltzer water poured over me in slow motion. Mottled hot and cool bolts of satin lapped across me. I stood again on a crowded floor, surrounded by heat, smells, voices, cigerettes and beer, but only seeing the lights. Pulsating reds, yellows, greens, blues, spinning floods. Only feeling the music, rumble deep in my chest and radiate outwards through my limbs. Riding like breaking waves.

They were the worst of times, period. I don't look back with rose colored glasses. I am not in love with my piece of the early 90's. We lived four or five or more to an apartment so we could afford rent. A college education seemingly only meant that everyone else had four years head start on us in the slim job market. We were all thin because when you only had money for food or cigarettes, nicotene won out and we made a few packs of Ramen noodles last a week.

Everything was volatile and fleeting.

All we had for sure back then was friendship and music. And in a fusion of these, I and my band of rogues had one constant escape then. AC/DC-Cult Night, every Sunday night. A few bucks for cover and a few bucks each for a bucket of beer (a literal bucket full of draft beer from which to comunally ladle - kind of revolting, really) bought us sanctuary. Four hours of forgetting the troubles we had outside the doors and burning off our pent up aggressions under the thunder of music as raw and brooding and lost as we were.

A lot of people look back to those years as the Glory Days. If you ask me, they sucked. I don't miss anything about that life at all.

But to this day, that was some of the best music I've ever heard. It still is.