1985. I was sixteen or so. Pimply, bespectacled, a new kid in a suburban school after moving from a small town in northern Minnesota (vaguely similar to my main character in my novel The Trinity), and in the new school all the kids belonged to some sort of clique, preppies, burnouts, jocks, honour students and I fit in none of the above and I didn't belong to anything; I had no religion, no favourite TV show, no real friends and I felt so very out of place so started to lean on music. I didn't have MTV in northern Minnesota and I discovered music and I spent all my after school job money on cassettes and vinyl and I purchased them sort of willy-nilly, selecting albums by their cover or if I liked their video and my collection was sort of poppish for the times, Chicago, Huey Lewis, Bruce Springsteen, The Cars… you get the picture.

But that was all changed by a commercial.

It was a commercial for a motor scooter, a Honda something or another and I'll be damned if I can remember the model. It showed a cool looking man with dark hair and sunglasses wearing black jeans and a black leather coat sitting on a scooter underneath a flashing Do Not Walk Sign at what appeared to be a New York City street corner. He sat there staring at the camera with the song ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ playing and I was haunted immediately by the bass lines, the plain-spoken vocals and the coloured girls going dooh-de-dooh dooh-dooh-de-dooh (something like that) and I found my god and religion in almost an instant. I walked a mile the next day after school to the local used record store and bought the album that contained the song from the commercial, the album was Transformer (produced by David Bowie and recorded in 1972). I was hooked and the music entered my soul like a needle in a vein and I made several return trips to the used record store and bought all the Lou Reed records I could (used they were about four bucks a pop) and this was long before the internet, the only research I could do was to buy records and play them in my room, the lonely boy behind aluminum siding with his headphones and dreams of future literary stardom and New York City became a Lou Reed junkie and later a music junkie as I learned Lou was the godfather of punk and I discovered The Velvet Underground, The Clash, The Buzzcocks, The Sex Pistols, The Stooges and on and on it went. I bought a bass guitar that I never learned how to play and I forged friendships with similar misfit boys but it's safe to say, my life was saved by Rock and Roll.

David LaBounty lives in suburban Detroit. His poems have appeared or will soon appear in Word Riot, Unlikely 2.0, Thieves Jargon, Zygote in my Coffee, Underground Voices and others journals. He is the author of two novels, The Perfect Revolution and The Trinity. He has just finished his third novel, Affluenza, a story about vanity, debt, pornography, consumerism and pyromania told the through the financial rise and fall of an insurance company executive. He is currently trying to find a publiser for Affluenza. To read a selection of LaBounty’s poetry on the showcase section fo this site, click here.

© 2009 Laura Hird All rights reserved.