Saturday, December 16, 2023
I met Matt when I was a freshman and he was a junior at Southwestern High School. He was the badass tom player in the marching band and I played saxophone, and we didn't really hang out. Our relationship changed dramatically when I got a bass guitar that Christmas. Our mutual friend Rob Hansen started a band with the two of us and, after a few lineup changes, Tim Prezipora on vocals. We called ourselves The Age of Stone. It was the first serious band for any of us and was where we really cut our teeth musically. We also became close friends, united in our devotion to Rush (we never covered them because we didn't consider ourselves worthy). We had one original, "Red Zone." I can't recall everything we covered, a few Van Halen tunes (everyone I knew who played in a band at Southwestern could play Van Halen; they were the lingua franca), Led Zepplin, Coney Hatch, INXS, Violent Femmes, Scorpions---a delicious mix of New Wave and hard rock.
Another big part of our friendship was him giving me rides back home from marching band rehearsal. This usually involved getting shakes and sometimes fries at McDonalds, lots of talking (usually about girls or music), and listening to 102FM, which was the pop music station at the time. As much as Matt was into progressive rock, he had a real affection for pop music, and gave me confidence to appreciate that stuff, even if it was totally uncool by Southwestern standards. I'm trying to remember his reactions to various songs when they came on, because they were priceless. Janet Jackson was a mutual favorite, and Whitney Houston (duh).
No ride home would be complete without a trip to "Space Mountain." The ride home involved country roads with lots of hills and no street lights. At the top of a hill, Matt would suddenly say in a rapid staccato "Space Mountain!" and off went the headlights. Fun times!
