TWO WEEKS IN ALCATRAZZ: Spring Break 1986

I had graduated the previous June but my best friend, bandmate and brother from another mother Christopher David was in his Senior year when it was decided that we should go to Florida for Spring Break in 1986. At age 18 I had never undertaken any sort of adventure such as this so I was game. Now let's just stop right there so I can assure you this is not another retelling of your stereotypical cliche teenage road trip adventure. This ain't Porky's. Despite our best efforts, Chris and I didn't even speak to one single girl for the entire week we were in Florida. With all the cheap hotels in Ft. Lauderdale booked up for the week, we found ourselves just north of there in what was at the time still a sleepy little villa called Lauderdale-by-the-Sea.

As I recall, our room was just across the street from the beach. So we swam in the ocean and threw frisbee, walking up and down the beach for many miles at all hours of the day, laughing at ourselves and our complete and total inability to approach the opposite sex. We ate junk food and drank Mountain Dew. We watched basic cable into the wee hours of the night on a wall-mounted TV in our room. We sat in the sun plucking the strings on a pair of beat up campfire guitars. But I don't think we spoke to a single soul outside of convenience store clerks, fast food workers and gas station attendants for a solid seven days.

Somehow we'd both secured a two week vacation from our respective jobs. The second week of our trip we spent visiting Chris's family in Birmingham, Alabama. We shot pool with his cousin Dana and sang along with Van Halen records at the top of our lungs. Our favorite band, they'd recently released their first record with new singer Sammy Hagar. The launch of their tour overlapped with our journey and we had tickets to see them while we were in Birmingham. It was no coincidence. We'd planned this whole trip so we could catch the show. Truth is Chris and I had been fans of Hagar for quite a while before he joined Van Halen. We skipped school the day tickets went on sale for Hagar's concert at the Cincinnati Gardens in November 1984 and scored second row seats. Skipping school always paid off. We even met Sammy behind the arena on the day of the show.

And so it came to pass that we saw Sammy's fourth ever appearance with Van Halen on March 31, 1986. Extra added bonus: The opening act was Bachman-Turner Overdrive, another big favorite of mine. Those early days with Sammy were good ones for Van Halen after all the drama with Dave's departure. Still in the honeymoon phase, they were having a ball onstage. During one particularly inspired jam they even played a little bit of "Rock Candy" from the first Montrose LP.

(This performance is from the band's appearance in Detroit just 10 days later.)

But the most memorable part of the trip was neither Florida's beaches nor the experience of seeing our favorite band performing with a dynamic new lead singer.

Chris and I were young musicians who already had deeper, wider, broader, more diverse taste in music than all the other kids. His Mom and my Dad were the kind of parents who raised their children on a steady diet of classic Oldies, Broadway musicals, Country & Western, the American songbook, and pretty much anything else you could tune in on the car radio or purchase on 8-track. We listened to everything. And I think it's fair to say that we found something of value in all of it. By 1986, Big Hair Metal was in full swing and we were most definitely under its sway. But to be honest we had recently discovered Punk Rock and fallen completely for it while not necessarily abandoning our Heavy Metal heroes. The previous summer we went to see the Four Tops and the Temptations. Just three months after our spring break trip to Florida we would attend our first Bob Dylan concert together. Our teenage Punk band the Speed Hickeys had debuted the previous December. So we were all over the place. For the long drive to Florida and back, we handpicked and packed at least 2 dozen cassettes of our current favorites. First up as we got on the road was Disturbing the Peace, the latest album by Heavy Metal band Alcatrazz and their first to feature former Frank Zappa guitarist Steve Vai. Stylistically, this is a really bizarre record. While it is decidedly 80s Metal / Hard Rock, it delves into spacey instrumentals, introspective dirge Rock, and just plain weirdness here and there. It's not at all accurate to call this album typical in any way as compared to other 80s Metal. Vocalist Graham Bonnet's brief tenure with Rainbow had already established him as one of the more powerful and unique vocal stylists of the era. But guitar wizard Yngwie Malmsteen had recently quit Alcatrazz after their debut album to launch his solo career. So the opportunity to replace Yngwie with Steve Vai must have seemed like the luckiest day of his life to Graham Bonnett. When you throw legendary record producer Eddie Kramer into the mix is when you know that we are really not talking about just another Heavy Metal record here. Still in our teens, Chris and I felt like we were connoisseurs of shit like this. Curators of the Great Cosmic Playlist. Before we were even in our twenties we had perfected the art and science of the mixtape. They were on actual cassettes back then and each 90-minute masterpiece was a tedious and time consuming endeavor. Krokus and Quiet Riot didn't cut it. But Alcatrazz? These guys were real musicians. Somewhere between our parents' influence and the music of Zappa, Steely Dan, Dead Kennedys, and Randy Rhoads, we felt we knew the difference between bullshit and the real deal. Punk Rock was the monkey wrench of course. The turd in the punchbowl. As much as we loved our metallic virtuoso guitar heroes, Punk had a sense of humor that most Metal did not and we responded to that big time. Our mixtapes just got weirder, like the soundtrack to a person having a schizophrenic meltdown. Especially as we began to discover bands like Fishbone and Oingo Boingo. But I digress. Just forty minutes into our epic journey South and we'd barely cracked into the rolling green hills of Northern Kentucky when it was time to change the cassette. But… It was stuck in the tape deck.

Those of us of a certain age remember very well what it was like to get a cassette stuck in your car's tape player. It often meant the death of that particular cassette. It usually meant several yards of tape were tangled up inside the car stereo, knotted irretrievably around all the little gears and tiny motorized cogs just inside the console. More often than not the cassette would eject after much of the actual tape was already unspooled, crinkled and damaged beyond repair. But this situation wasn't like that at all. This tape was thoroughly and completely wedged inside the tape deck. It wouldn't budge. We discovered right away that the tape would actually keep on playing. Being such big fans of the record, we may have even listened to it quite willingly all the way through a second time just thinking, Hell why not? Maybe we can pop it out later. Specific details of a road trip undertaken 36 years ago are lost to the ages. We did not keep a journal. It's safe to assume that we stopped for food and gas as needed. And I do recall tuning in local radio stations a few times whenever we passed through a big city like Nashville or Atlanta, always eventually losing the signal as we passed out of range. Nothing we picked up on the radio ever lasted beyond a couple songs so it was back to the Alcatrazz cassette. At the end of Side A it would automatically turn over and play Side B. And vice versa. Over and over. And so it came to pass, on a drive from Ohio to Florida, all around the Fort Lauderdale area for a week, from Florida to Alabama, all around the Birmingham area for another week, and then all the way back home to Cincinnati, Ohio, my friend Chris and I listened to that Alcatrazz cassette time and time again on infinite repeat.

Christopher David on the beach and in our room - Lauderdale-by-the-Sea 1986:

I could relay to you a quick and dirty review of the album. A song by song analysis from the opening strains of "God Blessed Video" to the Steve Vai guitar showcase "Lighter Shade of Green" and so on. But this isn't that kind of essay. Admit it: If you weren't interested in this kind of music back in the 80s, there's nothing I could say in 2021 that's gonna make you circle back thinking to yourself, "Damn, I can't believe I slept on Alcatrazz!" And if you are the kind of person who, like me, was scouring the racks and devouring shit like this back then, chances are you're already familiar. It is, suffice to say, an overlooked and underrated gem of the era. But Chris and I, to this day, have a very special relationship with this record. I suspect that Chris and I may be the only people in the history of the world who have listened to that particular album more or less non-stop for two weeks. According to Chris, "Not even the band could handle that." Over the course of 14 days I think we went through the entire spectrum of human emotions with that thing. Love, hate, sadness, acceptance, denial, anger, boredom, laughter. Lots of laughter. Round about Day 3 it was the worst, most redundant piece of shit ever recorded. But by Friday a Zen-like calm settled over Chris's 1982 Mustang as multiple layers of previously unheard depths hidden in the music began to reveal themselves. It went from meaningless fluff to seriously heavy shit and back again by the following Monday. Eventually we were just numb. Totally insensitized by the aural bludgeoning that by now we were strangely addicted to. We were beyond having an opinion about the record. It wasn't good or bad. Its reputation and relative merits didn't exist on some arbitrary scale of one to ten. It became our blood and the air we breathed. It was the wind in our hair. The sand in our shoes. It was our spiritual address. We lived inside it for 336 consecutive hours, as much if not more than any hotel room or cousins' guest room. And even when we weren't in the car, it played on in our heads relentlessly. "Stripper" is probably the best track on the album. You can no doubt guess exactly what the song is about. Chris and I still occasionally emulate Graham Bonnet's fiery screech, "Strippaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" And it brings memories of that long ago road trip flooding back again. It's not entirely accurate to say that I still know the entire album by heart. But it's not far off. I've often wondered what it would be like to recreate the experience. As an experiment, listen to the record - and little else - for two weeks. Again. In our youth it was one of a million shared experiences that bonded us as brothers forever. But I doubt if I could convince Chris to join me. Especially when we need only to hear one song, even just one word, and we're back in time, cruising down the highway, heading fearlessly into an unknown future.

"Strippaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!"