There is a very awkward phase in everybody’s life called the teenaged years. We all had to run through that jungle of over-activated hormones and insecurity in order to gain some life experience.
The rules of engagement were never exactly crystal clear in our adolescence, but guys like me knew precisely one thing in high school: chicks dug musicians.
To be a local rock star in Red Deer was a golden opportunity to meet women, in my somewhat simplistic view of the world around me.
Yeah, we noticed that some of the hottest chicks in high school were hanging around with the members of the most popular bands. These guys were too cool for school, in a real sense by comparison to guys like me.
High school is a giant learning curve in life and, for guys like me, I wish that I had learned to play lead guitar somewhere along the way in my brief life leading up to those high school years.
Instead, my personal musical Mount Everest was a gig as a very average clarinet player in a very average junior high school marching band.
Chicks have not dug clarinet players since the golden 1930s-40s Big Band era of Benny Goodman.
So I was one of those socially clumsy attendees at high school dances; the kind that popped back about three or four bootlegger beers and ran with a temporary alcohol-infused confidence boost during the festivities.
I was a rebel without a clue and I was most clueless about my complete lack of dancing ability. I danced like I was in the early throes of teenaged rigor mortis, but I really didn’t care because I was riding a solid three-beer buzz.
There is no real blueprint for social success in high school, but guys like me firmly believed that the rock bands had the best opportunities with the best looking babes in high school.
Sure, most of us never actually became a member of a rock band, but these guys provided us with an opportunity to meet women at every one of their dances, whether here in Red Deer or out at Varsity Hall in Sylvan Lake.
Now we get an opportunity to relive those days with the Rock and Roll Reunion at the Rink here in Red Deer on Friday, June 28.
Most of us have long since left that awkward adolescent phase of life and have been firmly entrenched in the awkward middle age phase of life for quite awhile, possibly even longer than the teenaged years in many cases.
This event will give all of us an opportunity to hear those same bands from our teenage past as they blast out the anthems from our youth.
The event will be less socially clumsy and we won’t have to smuggle in booze because the average age will be decidedly older than our teenage dances by many decades. This event will have bartenders — not bootleggers — to handle your alcohol requirements and you won’t have to keep a sharp lookout before you take a pull on a beer.
The event will feature six bands that were centre stage here in Red Deer in the 1960s and ’70s.
This shaker is a fundraiser for the Red Deer Museum and it is already closing in on its large capacity because it turns out that we may be older, but we still love a good time in life.
Contact the Red Deer Museum for the few remaining tickets.
Jim Sutherland is a local freelance writer.