Thomas Scott McKenzie - Power Chord: One Mans Ear-Splitting Quest to Find His Guitar Heroes

POWER CHORD

ONE MANS EAR-SPLITTING QUEST TO FIND HIS GUITAR HEROES

THOMAS SCOTT McKENZIE

FOR MOM AND DAD,

who bravely didnt try to protect my young eardrums and generously gave untold thousands of hours to listening to me blabber about music.

AND FOR MY AUNT CECIA,

who provided the little red eight-track player and encouragement that fueled many of these dreams.

Contents

M y band, Riot in the Temple, waited in a restricted area overlooking the stage at the storied Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, the same club that was rocked by everyone from the Doors to Van Halen to Guns N Roses. Some people dream of visiting Yankee Stadium or Wrigley Field. When I was a child, I longed to see the Whisky.

But now that I was in that hallowed hall of heavy metal, I desperately wanted to sleep. Sweaty palms, racing heartbeat, and the other stereotypical symptoms of stage fright never trouble me. Instead, an immense wall of exhaustion crashes down. I dont want to face the challenge; I just want to nap through it. I gripped my Telecaster as hard as possible, digging my fingertips into the strings, imagining them as cheese slicers cutting through the flesh of my fingers, trying to distract myself by focusing on the pain.

My bandmates had traveled from the Bay Area, New Mexico, and New York for this gig. I had come in from Columbus, Ohio, but my journey to the stage was far from a direct flight. Rather, it was the culmination of a strange quest that had taken me to rural campsites, dive bars, yoga communes, county fairs, and other bizarre locations in search of famous guitar heroes and forgotten legends.

Rudy Sarzo, a bass player who had rocked with Ozzy Osbourne, Quiet Riot, Whitesnake, and Dio, stood next to me in the wings and readied my bandmates to take the stage. He gave last-minute advicewatch for changes, stay on the beatand told the two drummers to watch for his cue.

My emotions swung from pride to embarrassment. I had reached a milestone of sorts by playing this famous rock club. But at the same time, it was a stretch to claim I would actually be playing since my skills were fairly limited.

Somewhere in the building was Ace Frehley, the original guitarist for KISS, whose riffs and solos were the soundtrack of my childhood. As a kid, I didnt have a security blanket or beloved toy that kept me safe. Instead, I had posters of Frehley on the wall to protect me from the bogeyman. I imagined those posters would come to life and the Spaceman would shoot lasers out of his guitar at any threatening creature. When trouble came walking, hed keep me safe.

And now, thirty years later, Frehley was going to play Rip It Out from his 1978 solo record with us. During rehearsal earlier in the day, I was wedged between Frehley and the wall. He was a much bigger man than you might expect, but I could lean around his shoulder and catch a glimpse of his blue-painted fingernails flashing across the fret board.

I had devoted years to hunting down and meeting my guitar heroes. And now I was about to play on the stage that had showcased so many of them. There was a Mtley Cre banner hanging over one of the bars, a relic from when the Whisky welcomed their prodigal sons home. Photos of Eddie Van Halen hung over the booths.

Guitar heroes command the stage and the audience. They exude total mastery of their instrument and their environment. I was doing the exact opposite.

The guitar tech looked confused when I told him about my intention to move the dial on my guitar in the opposite direction than normal. Instead of going to 11, I wanted to go into the negative numerical range.

Really? he asked. You sure?

Yeah, its not a mistake. Its on purpose. Dont try to fix it.

He had probably fielded countless strange requests over the years from rockers. His face remained blank. Dont argue with the talent.

Sarzo gave us the thumbs up and my bandmates started filing down the stairs that led to the stage as the audience applauded. I caught the guitar techs eye and nodded. He clapped me on the back and said, Dont fix it. Got it.

And then we were onstage at one of the most legendary rock venues in the world. It was an incredible accomplishment for a country kid from a small town in Kentucky. This was the culmination of years, decades even, of fandom and obsession, and now I was about to live my dream. Physically, it might not be the perfect representation of my childhood visions, but in my head it was certainly equal. And just getting to this point, simply going through with the whole enterprise, was a huge accomplishment.

As I hit the stage, the lethargy evaporated and I fingered my silent guitar, waiting for the guys to pick up the beat and lead us into rock and roll.

I was about to play the Whisky with a guitar that no one could hear.

But for a brief instant, in a way, in my mind, I was a guitar hero. That was good enough for me.

1
The Hardest Working Slacker in the World

I t wasnt easy for a seven-year-old boy to procure radioactive material in Bourbon County, Kentucky, during the seventies. So after careful consideration and much research, I decided to get struck by lightning.

On a muggy summer evening, as heat lightning fried through ominous purple clouds, I eased the screen door shut and started toward the back of our horse farm. Near the rear property line of our fifty-acre farm, a dead tree stood alone on a barren hill, normally a perfect setting for saving imaginary compatriots from an evil overlords noose. But that evening, instead of pulling off a daring rescue, I would use what I called the Tree of Sorrow to offer myself up to thunderbolts from the heavens.

In preparation for this experiment, I had loaded a Boy Scouts canteen, a cherry Pop-Tart, a tattered spiral notebook with a red cover, my metal orthodontic headgear, and a guitar pick in my backpack. The canteen and snack were a nod to sword-and-sorcery novels, where the hero packed for long quests accordingly. I didnt have mutton, mead, or ale, so tap water and foil-wrapped goodies would suffice.

The notebook was falling apart from use, the wire spiral distended and unevenly spaced. I had used a ruler and multiple colored pencils to rigorously document scientific examples of origin stories in which ordinary dudes transformed into larger-than-life figures, capable of unimaginable feats.

Astronaut Steve Austin crashed to Earth before being made better, faster, stronger. Billy Batson was selected by a race of wise elders who taught him to bellow Shazam! when trouble approached. The comic-book villain Juggernaut snatched a magic ruby from a cave while Molten Man spilled synthetic liquid metal all over himself. Even my heroes, the band KISS, who consumed my most every waking moment, were powered by pulsating red talismans, as they explained in the 1979 TV movie Attack of the Phantoms when Peter Criss says, Without those, were just ordinary human beings.

The majority of the transformations in my notebook involved exposure to radioactivity. Even casual pop culture observers knew about Peter Parkers glowing spider or the Hulks laboratory gamma rays. But I was an exhaustive researcher, so my ledger also included lesser-known fictional folks like a misshapen four-foot-six-inch Soviet evildoer named the Gremlin and a Chinese Communist physicist creatively named Radioactive Man.

Consoling adults had assured us Central Kentucky schoolchildren that we were a long way away from the Three Mile Island catastrophe, so I deduced it would be challenging to obtain radioactive waste.