Music Nerd

What’s your all-time favorite album?

This is a very hard question. So many albums have moved me during my long years on planet Earth. Albums that blew my thirteen-year-old mind. Albums that salved my savage soul. Albums that bring tears. Albums that clarify memories. At the end of the day, however, there is only one album that springs to mind, and it contains lyrics that described my life up to that point.

I’m an insider, I’ve been burned by the fire
Oh, and I’ve had to live with some hard promises
I’ve crawled through the briars
I’m an insider

• Insider – Tom Petty

I was sixteen and had been asked to leave the house. Banished to a life with other teenagers without parents, we weren’t lost children, just forgotten ones. There were five of us, and we called ourselves Insiders, a play on SE Hinton’s ‘The Outsiders.’ We weren’t a gang, just kids having lived through many hard and broken promises already.

One night in the spring of 1981, we made a pilgramage to the Memorial Colisuem in Portland, Oregon to see our hero, and we weren’t disappointed. At a quiet moment, I screamed out, “Rock and Roll!” Having heard me, Tom chuckled and said to the crowd, “Alright.” Then, glowing purple the rest of the night, he gave the best concert I have ever seen.

Fifty-four years having passed since that night, but I still remember it vividly. I didn’t really feel like a kid anymore, and that for the first time since that rainy day I left home, I figured things would be okay. As it turns out, it was. Alright.