ALBUMS: No Heavy Petting (1978); Phenomenon (1974)
MVC Ratings: Heavy4.0/$$$$; Phenomenon 4.0/$$$$$
These albums bring me back to Indiana, where I went to Klondike Junior High School.
Our nickname was the Nuggets and there was a little prospector dude with a pick-ax as our mascot. You can’t make this stuff up people.
Why we in the country and cornfields outside of West Lafayette, Indiana, had a gold mining theme, I don’t know. Indiana was flat as a pancake and if you looked to the west you could see Illinois.
UFO was a hard rock band, so much so that if not for the slower numbers would be considered Heavy Metal. But this was mid-1970s and the term heavy metal as a genre was in its infancy with bands like Black Sabbath leading the way.
Despite its hard rock reputation, UFO was a tuneful band, with technically proficient guitar playing mainly from Michael Schenker. He had previously worked in the German band the Scorpions, a band similar in aptitude and fluid guitar (by his brother Rudolph Schenker). The lyrics were banal, but that’s OK. They knew how to tap into the teen angst like all the hard rock bands were doing at this time. I just found that UFO sounded better than most of this ilk.
The summer after we had moved to Georgia, I was 15 and took a Greyhound to see my friends. (My poignant historical detail: We moved a lot. And these were some of the closest friends I had made heretofore in my young life.).
On the bus ride down I sat next to a Vietnam Vet drinking tall cans of beer (‘tall boys’).
“Where you headed man?’ the vet asked.
‘Indiana I said,’ I replied.
Oh shit,’ he said. “Indiana is the armpit of the nation.’
I still remember looking through the bus window as he said it and saw the rows of corn; it was probably mid-to-late summer, and time for the hard work of de-tasseling the corn. Occasionally, the landscape would be broken by a stand of trees or a little town that time forgot. The half-drunk vet wasn’t far off in his assessment, but as you’ll see later in the story, Indiana wanted me.
I got up there and the older brother of a friend let me stay in his trailer, at least part of the time. Good times, as we listened to UFO, REO Speedwagon (which was decidedly more hard rock than they became later in life.) And we listened to Led Zeppelin, lots of Zeppelin — in a hot sticky trailer baking in the Indiana summer heat.
There’s something about that time and place I’ll never forget; years later I related to the songs of Indiana singers like John Mellencamp and John Hiatt chronicling the nowhere feeling I got. It was a sad feeling of loss; Its origin I could not pinpoint.
One night near the end of my stay, we all piled into a big American-made car, about five of us. A friend said his family was going out of town and we could come over and play pool in the basement and maybe swim in a pool. Heck yeah, we were down for that. The house was like a mansion to us. Time passes and I guess we started getting louder as the caretaker of the property confronted us. A small hermit-like man, who lived on property, said he had called the police. Our pleas that we were invited did not persuade the caretaker, now yelling at us. So, we hopped in our car as Led Zeppelin wailed ‘keep me from the gallow’s pole.’
The police eventually caught up with one of our group at his home after running the car tag. My friends got into various degrees of trouble for that night’s escapade.
Me? I was on a Greyhound bus running southbound to my new home in Georgia.