A strange thing happened at the end of my two years in middle school. A split in the county boundaries sent all of my friends to one high school and me to another one. I was right back to where I started in the 7th grade...knowing no one, and now I was an angry fourteen-year-old girl. This is when I discovered hard rock and heavy metal music.
Fortunately, Tanya--an acquaintance I had known in middle school--was now at the same high school, and over the course of the next year we became best friends.
Initially we bonded over a shared obsession: Jon Bon Jovi. We were both mad about him. The inside of our lockers were covered in pictures we had ripped from magazines of the wild-haired rocker and his band mates. Both of us taped the late-night MTV show, Headbangers' Ball, every weekend and then poured over the videos the next day while comparing notes on the phone. We watched, rewound, and re-watched the videos for "Living on a Prayer" and "You Give Love a Bad Name." We were positively apoplectic over taped interviews with the rockers, and we regularly shared our favorite pictures out of the music magazines.
Bon Jovi was my "gateway drug" to other metal bands like Ratt, Motley Crue, Poison, and Skid Row. Many metal bands graced my locker walls over the years. My obsessions with bands came and went (just like a lot of the bands themselves), but thirty years later it pleases me to see that Bon Jovi is still out there rocking it!
What were some of your favorite bands in high school?
