There are those songs that you love and can't even objectively tell if they're good or not because they so firmly belong to a certain place and time. Like I can't hear "Cum on Feel the Noize" without thinking about third-grade P.E. class, which you'd think would not be such a great thing to revisit. But every Friday we had Friday Free Play, which meant we could listen to music and either jump rope or play cageball, a vast improvement over the usual routine of making humiliating, never-ending attempts at passing the Presidential Fitness Test.
The coolest kid in our class was a Quiet Riot fan, and one Friday morning he asked the surly gym teacher to play the single on her little record player with the speaker in front. This kid's status was unassailable; at eight years old, in Plano, Texas, he had a mullet and an earring, wore tight black jeans with a pair of drumsticks in the back pocket, and managed to pull off an honest-to-god strut. He took a little shit for it, but not too much; we all knew no one else even came close.
So all us kids listened, and it went over pretty well. He asked to play it again the next week. And then Friday Free Play was not complete without it, and we clamored for it every single week. We had music, or at least a song we liked because it was part of our own lives and not because we heard it in our mom's car all the time. It was great, being one of fifty sweating, exhilarated third-graders jumping rope to Quiet Riot every Friday.
The next year we abandoned that song for Van Halen's "Jump," which to my nine-year-old self was pleasingly appropriate, given all the rope jumping, and still a pretty good song. 1984 was even the first album I picked out for myself, although the tape mysteriously disappeared after I played it for my mom on a road trip. I'm sorry, though, "Jump" doesn't rock nearly as hard as "Cum on Feel the Noize," and sometimes people wanted to listen to Huey Lewis or Lionel Richie instead. The point is, it just wasn't the same.
I don't remember what we played in fifth grade. It's possible the surly gym teacher got in trouble for meting out too many swats and we had someone else in charge who was kinder but didn't understand the importance of playing metal 45s during Friday Free Play, but don't quote me on that.
I Googled the coolest kid in third grade just now before I wrote this post and found his band's MySpace page. I've never heard of them, but they sound like a lot of other bands I have. You can tell the band is from Dallas, somehow, by listening to them. I'm a little disappointed I don't like them better, but I am happy to report that he still plays drums and looks exactly like himself.