I look forward to reading the rest of Steve Hyden’s six-part(!) series about his experience being a life-long R.E.M. fan over at the av club for a lot of reasons, but mostly because of the first installment’s uncanny ruminations about the experience of being “a fan” in the way that only a certain type of teenager can.

I didn’t become a “fan” of R.E.M. until well past both my teenage years and the band’s indie cred sell-by date, but that doesn’t mean I don’t relate to the time period Hyden describes, filling me both with “wow, I’m old” reflexive waxing and further wishes that I had jumped on the train toward, as guitarist Peter Buck called it, the “acceptable edge of the unacceptable stuff” a bit earlier.

I know now that I wasn’t emotionally mature or experienced enough (unsurprisingly, I was always a bit backward about that stuff) to “get” this sort of semi-fringe material back then, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t get the experience of being an adolesecent teenage fan – my targets were just a little bit more blue-collar and mainstream.

I’m going to steal Hyden’s opening words here, because he makes the point really well:

When you love a band—especially when you’re young—you end up forming a weird, sacred, and irrational bond that’s entirely one-sided and exists only in your mind. Even when that love lasts for years and years, outlasting “real” friendships and romantic entanglements and living on as one of the only constants in your life outside of family (and maybe not even family), it’s still essentially a construction you’ve made up for the sake of entertainment. Bands can’t love you back; the best they can offer is an abstract, “Hello Cleveland!” kind of appreciation.

Being a fan is a more socially acceptable version for having an imaginary friend.

At the time of life Hyden describes, my socially acceptable imaginary friend was Bon Jovi.

I started having my musical awakening – that is, being aware of music outside of the context of whatever my family had on in the background – somewhere around 1985-86. The first record I remember going to local department store and buying with my own money, was Springsteen’s Born in the USA. I played the bearings out of that cassette tape, enjoying the blue-collar bar rock, and “got” the general emotional content, having absorbed enough of the small Rust Belt town ennui by osmosis, though the record’s overt anti-Reagan-Era populism was completely lost to me, because hey, I was eleven, and lived in a home that was largely apolitical, at least as far as I could tell.

Luckily for me, there soon appeared a younger, less political Jersey Shore analogue riding on the acceptable edge of the hair metal wave to sweep me up. A band that tapped into that blue-collar Northeast sensibility without all that teeth-gnashing resentment; less drowning one’s sorrows at the steelworker’s bar and more party time kegger on the beach, an act that still played into the oddly mascara-ed machismo of the LA glam metal era, but without losing sight of its east coat rock & roll roots. It was pretty much calculated to fill a particular developmental niche for me.

Somewhere in that whole “tween” period (not that we called it that), I got my first “stereo”, a Sears special cabinet with separate speakers, a dual cassette deck and a turntable (at the time that vinyl was already on the way out) for Christmas. Along with that gift, I got a couple of actual long-playing records, including Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet.

To be honest, I didn’t totally “get” all of that record either; but the whole business about how “she lost more than that in my back seat, baby” in “Never Say Goodbye” felt refreshingly scandalous, not unlike being let temorarily into the “grown up” world of a cool older brother I didn’t have or the much-admired older cousin I did have but never really connected with. Like millions of budding teenagers before me, I’d found my initial outlet for slowly developing some sort of understanding of the emotions of puberty, and a means of developing a (sometimes fatally flawed) road map for navigating (largely theoretical) teenage relationships.

I also relate to the idea of taking perceived slights against the object of one’s fandom personally – it was the mid-eighties, and metal, in all it’s hair/glam/speed/thrash variations, was in full swing (it was pretty much the only thing swinging besides the AM gold flavored top 40 on the one pop radio station one could reliably tune in). Despite all the makeup and hairspray the bands all used, *my* band was, for myriad reasons, considered a “chick band” by the burnouts with Marlboro-scented jean jackets emblazoned with Metallica back patches. I was crushed that this proto-music snob crowd (who I found simultaneously intimidating, frightning, and yet somehow noble in their dedication to their chosen aesthetic) looked down on my obsession, but was given (false) hope by the fact that I shared a common passion with some pretty girls who I had confusing but intriguing (and ultimately unresolved) feelings about.

But, fandom at that age, in that era, was primarily personal – it’s not like the cons I attend today, where the best part of the experience is connecting with other like minded individuals over shared passions – I pursued knowledge largely by myself, listening and re-listening to my cassette copy of New Jersey for some new wrinkle of understanding or meaning, digesting articles in rock magazines bought at the grocery store or fleeting “news” reports on MTV. I scoured record store racks for b-sides, movie soundtrack spots and the one-in-a-million shot of a mis-shipped japanese import, and cursed the fact that I didn’t live within 100 miles (a distance that might as well have been light years back then) of a venue where my heroes might be playing.

But, the experience was mine, and despite the fact that I was mostly an overweight social outcast, the music and lyrics Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora wrote somehow spoke to me, and provided the crutch that I, like so many teenagers, needed to work my way through awkward adolescence.

It’s kind of embarassing to think about now, especially since I seem to have largely grown apart from that mindspace – Bon Jovi’s aesthetic, then and (especially) now, just don’t speak to me much anymore. I changed, and to a lesser extent, so did they (I guess the answer to the lyrical question in the title of this post ended up being “no”, at least in my case). However, I’ll always have fond memories of when I finally got to see the band live from the nosebleed seats in the early 90s in Philadelphia, and will still occasionally pick up a guitar and find I can still effortlessly knock out the acoustic intro hook from Wanted Dead or Alive without thinking about it. That sort of obsessive devotion at the right time of life somehow becomes an inextricable part of your DNA.

Since then, there’ve been other cases of incurable fandom to supplant this initial one – often smaller, niche artists: Barenaked Ladies, The Badlees, Jonathan Coulton – many of whom I’ve managed to meet, or in one or two cases, befriend over the years. Then there are the “missed opportunity” discoveries of bands that shone brightly and then self-destructed years before you knew they existed – The Replacements, and to a lesser extent for me, R.E.M. Those, however, are all seemingly more “adult” experiences, with different kinds of emotion and appreciation. One’s interaction with artistic expression as an adult is different; more textured, layered, with a deeper understanding due to having lived more life, and thus have a wider base to relate from. Being able to see and appreciate things through the adult lens is one of the great benefits of being an adult to begin with; it’s a great thing to experience.

None of it, though is really as pure and formative an experience as the fandom you had for the band whose poster you had on your bedroom wall when you were fourteen.