If your exposure to this particular song has been limited to enduring someone else's excruciating late-night karaoke version, I'm going to ask you to undertake a brief thought experiment.Imagine you've just spent four 1/2 of your best years in a city whose net effect on the soul can be charitably described as identical to that of a meat grinder on 5 pounds of beef chuck. For lack of a more creative example, let's call this city "Los Angeles." Let's imagine that your "Los Angeles" experience began with getting your heart broken and sloped gently downhill from there, through a succession of dead-end entertainment industry jobs and withering daily commutes that left you lying fetally on your couch at the end of each day, sipping screwdrivers, watching your roommate's DVDs, any aspiration to creative action totally sapped. You've been swindled out your early twenties by a city that is nothing more than a glorified flashing billboard for eager young dupes like yourself, dressing up a dystopia of mass delusion and lousy central planning and selling it to you as the quintessential American paradise.
Now imagine you are in your Mazda, speeding east from this abominable black hole with all your possessions, having made up your mind. You ain't wasting no more time. You pop a farewell mix cd, hastily cobbled together by a friend, into the stereo. After a truncated version of Paradise by the Dashboard Light that got downloaded from Limewire, Here I Go Again comes on. It's not the long, sludgy, somewhat more honest first version from '82, or the shorter, more muscular, harder rocking greatest hits version. It's the full-on, cheesed-up '87 version, polished to a sickly monster ballad sheen, with the opening organ solo supplemented by a chiming synthesizer. Imagine now, as the sun sets behind you and you find yourself—a grown man—driving through an ever-scrubbier landscape at the edge of San Bernadino county, that David Coverdale starts in with, "I don't know where I'm goin'/But I sure know where I've been." I DARE you not to clutch the steering wheel and weep like a little girl.
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Dare accepted.
ReplyDeleteI dunno, Dan. You're already crying at the Mountain Goats...how much further do you need to be pushed?
ReplyDeleteI need enough booze to kill a nurse shark. Then we'll see if Coverdale can get my tears flowin'.
ReplyDeleteI dare YOU to cruise down Sunset Blvd, heading west towards your villa out in Malibu, the orange sun setting behind a billboard advertising your new show,and a 10,000 dollar a night hooker sitting shotgun in your porsche and not start weeping with joy.
ReplyDeleteOk, you almost had me up until "10,000 dollar a night hooker". Is that supposed to be seductive? Decadent idiocy? This is why I object to the culture of hack bullshit LA fantasy.
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