I Built This City

May 8th, 2004 Posted in Essays

I was drinking beer in a pub with a friend last night when ‘We Built This City on Rock and Roll’ came on. He winced and said how much he hated 80’s music.

I feigned shock and then asked for clarification. “You meant to say you hate 80’s music except for Chris de Burgh and Warrant, right?”

He explained that he had fully meant to include both in his condemnation.

So with several beer already in me and eager to annoy him, I started improvv’ing a fantastic 80’s metal song right there on the spot. My first verse started out on the premise that the time was right to start up a fight, and that I’d put out his lights. Seguing into a guitar break—”eedily-deedily-dweeeOWWWW!”—I interpreted his horrified silence to mean my song was kicking a lot of ass, and I elaborated on my earlier “time being right to start fight” premise by explaining that I had the heart of a wolf in the city tonight, come on!

By the time I got to the explosive chorus—”The heat of the heart is an animal, you gotta believe, you gotta receive, cuz I’m on the prowwwwwwl for looooooove!”—I was adding in detailed descriptions of the music video to accompany the song, in which our band (”Draggyynn”) would play the song on top of a building at night, surrounded by helicopters driven by beautiful women who, at the chorus, turned into wolves and looked at me knowingly, since I had the heart of a wolf.

“And then the camera zooms in, and you can see I’ve got wolf eyes,” I say.

“Please stop.”

“You can be the drummer. Stixxx Scorpio. Nice.” As I explained the necessity of putting three x’s in “sticks”, two things occured to me: one, that after five minutes of this I’d succeeded in annoying my friend, and he was about to hit me in the face. And two, that I was clearly born in the wrong decade, where conceptual talents like mine would have made me a millionaire.