A rough crack at a "Literacy Narrative"

[I free-wrote this in little over an hour. ...very rough.]

One hundred dollars, including innocuous service fee, all for less than two hours of a musical experience I could easily approximate with my haphazard CD collection—why sink so much money for tickets to a show at Sangamon Auditorium of all places—Jethro Tull. I have gone to live performances of the band in various incarnations every seven years or so since 1993, but why Tull, you ask?
At the age of fourteen, I began hanging out with an older crowd, whose references varied from AD&D to Wicca [In my neighborhood, you were either nominally Baptist or “White Trash” pagan. This was the late eighties, before the internet. If you wanted to explore anything beyond the church on the corner or the televangelist on the tube—and my grandmother gave $10,000 that I can document to Jim and Tammy Baker—you had to catch a ride to the shady head shop downtown, away from the paper quaintness of lower-middle class smugness, or find the local “guru” who believed that reading through Buckland’s Complete Guide to Witchcraft and a few Piers Anthony novels qualified him to lead a spiritual movement. Bathing regularly would have been a nice touch. Just how many reincarnations of Jim Morison and Alistair Crowley were there in suburban Texas?]. Oh yes, our attention darted from one revolutionary idea to the next—so misunderstood, but there was one constant: the music, and particularly the lyrics, of Jethro Tull.
When my friend Gene, brilliant artist, would-be guru, and eventual Black Hand Vampire, first played “Thick as a Brick,” “A Passion Play” and “Minstrel in the Gallery” for me on cassette, Ian Anderson’s metaphors and unapologetic cynicism attracted me to the concepts driving his albums. I listened to those tapes over and over to glean meaning from his words—so much more complex even than Cliff Burton’s writing with Metallica, another favorite at the time. Tull’s work resonated with me then as intensely relevant, even though the band reached the height of its popularity in the mid ‘70s, shortly after I was born. Anderson himself had begun to explore the hypocrisy in of the religious status quo openly in the famous “Aqualung” album, and his relationship to the revival of British and Northern European folk traditions in “Songs from the Wood” and “Broadsword and the Beast.” Tull’s music was both the soundtrack to and the justification of my understanding of the world at that time. I felt sophisticated, being able to sound off heady classic rock lyrics [I say “sound off” because I certainly couldn’t sing. I still can’t]. It was tough being the long-haired crippled kid who wore tie-dyes everyday to reflect his mood, especially in my home town […seen “King of the Hill”?].
While I wouldn’t consider myself a Wiccan now anymore than I would consider myself Christian in any conventional sense [I’m a Hare Krishna, if you want to know.] and my musical taste has expanded to include the likes of Chuck D and Kris One, and of course, Charlie Parker, as I listen to Tull as I’m typing this sentence, the feelings of the open-ended possibilities of youth return, tinged with a little sadness, maybe, for decisions not made…[cliché? …probably]. [I do still play D&D.] It would be all too easy for my to resent my friends from the old neighborhood, with a “I got out of the ghetto” attitude, but as I listen to Tull, I recognize that even the would-be gurus played an integral role in who I am know. So I thank them, and I will pay Sangamon’s price for a bit of youth.