(With Apologies to Chuck Klosterman)
I had long hair once. For about three hours.
It could be argued that I had long hair for somewhere in the neighborhood of five to eight years, but that all depends on your perspective. It didn’t seem long at the time, which would have been somewhere between six and twelfth grades; it just seemed normal. It was never exceptionally long, but that’s just how we wore our hair back in the middle of the 1980s, especially if you were someone like me who had the kind of incessantly curly hair that every stylist to ever point a pair of scissors at my head fawned over, despite how much I hated it. I mean, really, DNA? Had it been asking too much for hair that could be stylishly feathered back like freakin’ every other person in my high school wore theirs?
My go-to stylist during these time was Jan, the woman who did the haircutting for my mother, my sisters, and me for probably all of the early life years spent growing up in Elk River. (My father had been pretty decisively bald by his early 30s, so he only needed my mother to dig out a pair of clippers stored in an old ice cream bucket on the bottom shelf of the bathroom closet every month or two to keep him looking respectable). I got the same cut every time which probably led Jan into thinking I was a fairly easy to satisfy customer, which is why we probably got along as well as we did.
One time, in high school, when she asked her standard haircut preface statement of “You want to do anything different this time?” I impulsively mentioned I might like it a tiny bit longer in the back. I kind of liked it when I could see my hair starting to grow down below my ears just before haircut time was due, and thought it might be cool to try that out as a starting point. Maybe it would even compensate for the fact that I literally had no other options of what to do with that curly brown demon that live on my head.
It turned out that Jan and I had two dramatically different ideas of exactly what “a tiny bit longer in the back” looked like. Basically she mulletted me.
I had never heard the term “mullet” used in reference to a haircut at this point in life — truth be told, I didn’t cross paths with that vocabulary term until Billy Ray Cyrus broke through with “Achy Breaky Heart” and I had asked someone exactly what in the hell he had going on with his hair. When Jan spun me around to see the mirror, I tried to contain my shock. It was a very nice and skillfully-crafted curly hair mullet. It made me look like I could have passed for a saxophone player in Tina Turner’s live band, but it was not at all what I had in mind.
Since I wasn’t the best at self-advocating at this age — a skill I probably didn’t really lock down until my mid-forties — I told her it looked fine. I talked myself into thinking that it was really mostly pretty close to what I wanted, but just a little longer. I’d get used to it. Probably. People would be surprised when they saw it, but that’s how it always was with new haircuts. After a day or two, maybe a week on the outside, they’d get used to it as well and it would just become normal. I should have known enough to put all of those rationalizing thoughts aside as soon as I saw my mother’s wide-eyed reaction. To her credit, she didn’t say anything critical, although she was a teacher and it’s entirely possible she was ready to let me move forward with this Me Decade affectation and see what it would be like down inside the hole I was digging for myself.
I honestly don’t remember if either of my sisters ever saw it. I would have to think at least one of them did, but when we got home I probably went straight to my bedroom, put on some music, and did whatever nerdy things I would have been doing back in those days to pass the time until dinner. That’s when my father would get home from work. That’s when the real reckoning would take place.
I walked out to the table feeling much more sheepish than I tried to look. I took my place opposite my father and began the usual dinner rituals like nothing in the world was the least bit different. When he finally looked up and noticed my haircut, he paused what he was doing only long enough to consider the sight in front of him before uttering a single syllable:
“No.”
I tried to tap into the collective cultural knowledge rock and roll had taught me about rebelling against my parents, but only mustered a half-hearted, “What?” in my defense. Half-hearted because (a) I had absolutely expected that reaction, and (b) I was immediately relieved because of it. He may not have known it at the time, but he was giving me the out I didn’t realize I wanted so badly. I wouldn’t ever have to leave the house and risk anyone seeing me like that, but I had been blessed with the rock-and-roll rite of passage of having my father tell me I had to cut my hair because it was too damn long.
It might have been that very moment, or it might have been after dinner was finished, but it was within the half-hour that my mother had out her home hair clippers kit and had me neatly de-mulletted and ready to be seen in public again. I don’t even think I had put up much of a fight. To this day I believe she completely understood precisely how much of an accidental favor I felt my father had done for me.
Never in my too-damned-close to fifty orbits have I ever lived anything that even closely approximated a rock and roll lifestyle. I’ve never smoked. I’ve never taken any drugs stronger than valium, which was prescribed, and all it did was give me a hopefully short-lived reputation for nodding off during staff development sessions. The amount of alcohol I’ve consumed in my life likely wouldn’t match the liquid volume of a case of beer. I’ve been single my whole life, and the number of women I’ve been involved in with serious, honest-to-God relationships could be counted on one hand.
But that’s just the sex and the drugs. I have always lived and breathed the rock and roll.
Not just rock, though. Rock, pop, alternative, metal, power metal, progressive metal, progressive rock, Christian rock, classical, classic rock, holiday music, show tunes, blues, modern blues, adult contemporary, modern bluegrass, electronic, folk, hip-hop, soul, rap, hardcore rap, soundtracks, scores, easy listening, jazz, punk, power punk, noise pop…the ABCs of music.
And of course, ABC stands for Anything But Country. I’m not denying anyone’s right to listen to and/or enjoy country music, whether it’s the old school Grand Ol’ Opry stuff or the thinly-veiled sexual assault glorifying bro-country of the post-millennial age, but it’s just never been a path I’ve explored, or even found all that compelling. Even if I grew up in what was basically farm country, the only people at my school who even listened to country music were the kids who all worked at McDonald’s and seemed to buy matching t-shirts every time Alabama came back to play at the State Fair. So as much as I hate to fall into the category of cliché, anything but country is all too apt of a descriptor for my musical taste.
I collected records like trading cards, then graduated to cassettes, then stepped into the real future with compact discs, which ended up with digital files both downloaded and streamed. It’s kind of astonishing to stop and think of how so much of the favorite music I’ve had in the past fifteen or so years wouldn’t exist as it does now if not for math.
I didn’t have the long hair, or even the cool hair for that matter, but I wore my way through a constantly-evolving collection of concert t-shirts. I easily spent more time in ninth grade reading album liner notes than I did assigned novels. I was never shy about rolling down the windows while driving through the high school parking lot to let the outside world know what album I had jammed into the cassette player of my parents’ snot-green Mitsubishi subcompact. I spent dozens of hours at the St. Cloud record stores mining the discount bins for the next great surprise album that would help me define my college years. After getting my first desktop computer, I tried to teach myself the how to use the database tool in ClarisWorks by creating a comprehensive listing of the albums in my music library, including with notes and ratings.
So I never needed the long hair to prove to anyone I had the musical bona fides. They were in my blood, and they’d been there for generations, lying dormant and waiting for the right push to be sonically activated.
Which didn’t happen until I reached the ripe old age of seven.
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