So far, if you’re following along, we’ve gotten through 
high school. Van Halen joined Bruce, The Stones, The Kinks, and The Who as my favorite bands – all of whom I got to see live at least once. 102.7 WNEW-FM was my station, playing the ’60’s – ’80’s rock-n-roll before it was labeled “classic rock.” Van Halen led me to The Scorpions, Bon Jovi, Ratt, and the hair metal bands of the mid-eighties, while my sister and some of my friends were listening to new wave on WLIR, so I got to sample all of that, from Erasure to the Cure to The Cult and The Smiths. And movie soundtracks kept pop-rock alive for me, from Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” to Huey Lewis and Phil Collins’ bland soundtrack work. I heard it all, basically. Then I got to college.
UVM was (and is) an interesting mix of super-WASPy and super-crunchy, with a broad range of types in the middle (it was also glaringly Caucasian). I remember move-in day of freshman year in the “Shoebox” dorms on Main Campus, with different people blasting the Dead, Elvis Costello’s Greatest Hits, Bob Marley’s Legend, and The Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits out different windows at full volume. That about encompassed the musical tastes among the student body at the time. The preppy kids might be into new wave beyond Elvis Costello or pop as well, but they weren’t blaring it out any windows. The middle class kids (like me) were also into straight-ahead rock or metal, but again, no one was rocking Aerosmith or Springsteen at full volume (though you know I would have liked to).
That fall, as a first-semester freshman, my friends were largely the people in my dorm (Buckham Hall, now demolished). Vermont has just changed the drinking age from 18 to 21 (the second-to-last state in the US to do so), so we were the first class at UVM that was considered “under-age” – hence we spent a lot of time hanging out in the dorm at night, either studying or watching the one TV in the common room. Luckily, we had basic cable on that one TV, and we watched either ESPN or MTV most of the time. So it was that late one Friday night, I wandered into the common room to see what was going on and was absolutely taken aback by a video on late-night MTV from a new band I had never heard before, and only read about in Random Notes in Rolling Stone once or twice before.
The video for Guns-N-Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” came on and I didn’t know whether I was more scared or thrilled, though I was definitely both. It was such an exciting sound – like a way dirtier, more edgy Motley Crue; more authentically dangerous and hard-living than any popular hair metal band of the day was pretending to be, and so much edgier than Aerosmith or ’80’s Alice Cooper. The next day, I went straight down College Street to Pure Pop – the local record shop in Burlington – and bought the CD. Putting it on the CD player, I was amazed.
This band had mastered all the forms of hard rock that had come before, from the bluesy hard rock of Aerosmith and Bad Company to the bombastic attack and rough-hewn virtuosity of Zeppelin to the hair metal accoutrements of the day. Every song was amazing – and different. And this was their first record????? Like with Van Halen I, I was forever changed by the thrill I felt hearing these songs for the first time. “Welcome to the Jungle” was as a great an introduction to the band as “Running with the Devil” had been for VH. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” remains on my all-time playlist for its perfect combination of balladry and groove. “Paradise City,” “Nighttrain,” “Mr Brownstone,” and on. All cool as hell.
I think it’s interesting to note that these songs had literally nothing to do with my life. I could not in any way relate to the stories being told or the situations being described. And yet, at 18 and filled with anticipation for what lay ahead in my life, this album felt like a soundtrack for moving forward. It still does. Everything I listen to it, I get transported right back to that common room on the first floor of Buckham Hall – standing there, jaw agape, feeling myself leaving my musical “safe zone” and ready to explore new things. Thank you Gunners.
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