Only one video this week, kids, but it’s a bit longer than average, so maybe that will help cushion the blow:<\/p>\n
<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>This was the song that made me a Def Leppard fan. Up until this point of their career, I’d dismissed them without even bothering to listen to their stuff. The dippy spelling of their name and the generally ominous look of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.defleppard.com\/discography\/index.asp\">their album covers<\/a> had given me the impression that they were another bunch of scary head-bangers along the same lines as Motley Crue or Iron Maiden; as much I liked rock, the <i>really<\/i> hard stuff was never my cup of tea. But then one afternoon, I was hanging out in that student-union television lounge I’ve <a title=\"Friday Evening Videos: \u201cFly to the Angels\u201d\" href=\"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/2010\/03\/friday_evening_videos_fly_to_t\/\">written about<\/a> before, and I happened to glance up from my book in time to catch one of those lovely shots of the classic cars driving through the late-afternoon autumn sunshine. I instantly identified with the imagery — that was how I spent most of my weekends in those days, driving my massive old Ford Galaxie up and down the nearby canyons, in search of inspiration or enlightenment or simply something to do, and this video captured the same quality of light that I loved (and still love) to bathe myself in during those drives — so I kept watching. And I listened, too, and the song itself clicked with my mood that afternoon.<\/p>\n<p>This particular song transports me back to that time of my life more completely than any other memory trigger I can think of. Just reviewing the video for today’s entry has stirred up all kinds of things: the greasy-salty taste and texture of the English chips I liked to snack on during the long gap before my evening philosophy class; the smell of my first leather jacket (pigskin, slightly more pungent than the more common cowhide jackets); the cheap paperback bio of Janis Joplin I borrowed from my aunt Sharon and devoured in a couple hours while lying on the grass under a tree in back of President’s Circle. I remember my general emotional state in those days, too, a heady mixture of curiosity, enthusiasm, hope, lust, and an aimless yearning for something I couldn’t quite define. (The yearning is still there, but the other stuff tends to come and go more than it did then.)<\/p>\n<p>And I especially remember this one particular girl… she was younger than me, some kind of prodigy who’d been moved up a grade or two, whip-smart but more than a little flaky. Being away from home at the big old university eventually proved to be too much of her, and she vanished toward the end of our freshman year. I have no idea what became of her; I imagine she went back home, wherever that was, and attended a community college for a couple years until she felt more confident. If I’d been smarter, or at least more assertive, I might’ve tracked her down. She had gray eyes, you see… they aren’t just an affectation in bad novels, they really <i>do<\/i> exist. Gray eyes, and long, straight, honey-colored hair. And most days she wore these knee-high moccasin boots. She dared me once to kiss those boots.<\/p>\n<p>Hysteria, when you’re near…<\/p>\n<p>I don’t know about you guys, but that seems like a good image to end the work week on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Only one video this week, kids, but it’s a bit longer than average, so maybe that will help cushion the blow: This was the song that made me a Def Leppard fan. Up until this point of their career, I’d dismissed them without even bothering to listen to their stuff. The dippy spelling of their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-friday-evening-videos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1916\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}