Free Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life by Steve Almond Page B

my lame exegesis and began to talk about what “Fade to Black” had meant to her.
    So let’s travel back to East Hartford, Connecticut, circa 1986. Erin is twelve years old, a shy sixth grader at St. Christopher’s. Like most budding DFs, she lives in the thrall of an older sibling, in this case Rob, two years her senior, handsome and popular and unruly, a badass with big hair. One day, Rob plays her a tape of a band called Poison. The album cover confuses her—are the members women or men?—but the music slices through her like lightning. Before long, she’s movedon to the heavy stuff—Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica. Posters go up on her wall. Her hair rises skyward in a fusillade.
    Her parents, strict Catholics, are aghast. Erin has always been the good one, studious, pliant, the kind of kid who memorizes the lives of the saints. Her mother has developed the sweetly deranged fantasy that her daughter will someday play violin for the Hartford Symphony. Erin’s announcement that she is quitting violin to take up electric guitar serves as a formal declaration of war. Her father is dispatched upstairs to tear the posters from her walls, to confiscate all records deemed offending and redact the rest. Her mother will later carry a tape of Mötley Crüe’s
Shout at the Devil
into the backyard and smash it to bits with a hammer.
    The mistakes are easy enough to see in retrospect. If one were writing a manual entitled “How to Ensure That Your Troubled Teen Will Fall into the Clutches of Heavy Metal,” Erin’s folks provide a useful model. But their sense of betrayal is honest and not without sympathy. Heavy metal is telling them everything they don’t want to know about their daughter: that she is angry, that she is a sexual being, and (most painfully) that she dreams of escape. What parent wants to be told such things?
    In ninth grade, Erin transitions into public high school. She hangs out with the bad kids, her brother’s friends especially. Having grown up amid the obsessive sexual prohibitions of the Church, she now saunters the neighborhood in stretch jeans for the sheer pleasure of hearing men in cars honk at her. Her parents are convinced she has become a fallen woman, though she is in fact that far more common breed among metal chicks: a virgin seeking the power of a slut.
    It is amid this feuding that Erin finds “Fade to Black.” Most metal songs are aspirational, wishful odes to hedonism. “Fade to Black” is a dirge about a guy so alienated he savors the prospect of his own suicide. The song strikes Erin as an epic transcription of her life. She, too, feels hopelessly misunderstood, trapped with no way out. For months,she’s been scouring the want ads for rented rooms. But she has no money and no way to get a job.
    She listens to “Fade to Black” over and over: the somber opening notes, the chords ringing out above the martial thump. She learns it on the guitar because she wants to be noticed by the older boys, and because she figures maybe she’d become a rock star and that will be her ticket out. She likes the ending best, after James Hetfield growls
“Death greets me warm, now I will just say goodbye”
and Kirk Hammett rips into his solo and the whole band starts to gallop, triumphant, unstoppable, a violent blur. She knows it’s fucked up that “Fade to Black” makes suicide heroic, but that’s how it feels, like she’ll be seizing control of her life once and for all, meting out the ultimate punishment to her parents.
    Things get worse. They always do in this kind of story. Rob moves out of the house and the disputes between Erin and her folks escalate into physical altercations. One afternoon, she is pulled out of class by her parents and driven to a psychiatric hospital. Their goal is naïve, if not quite unkind. They want professionals to take away the wild mascaraed creature that dwells upstairs and return to them the docile, straight-A student they can safely love. They are