Circles. The Fleur de Lys. Immediate. 1966.

Is there any more durable a symbol of middle class consumer excess than an outdoor neighborhood shopping mall with manicured grounds and vigilantly maintained water fountains, and a semi-detached General Cinema twin screen, first run movie theater, featuring nationwide major distribution titles? My childhood enchantment with Seminary South Cinemas I & II began in an edifice erected as an environmental correlative to the late century American personality; non-descript and functional. The lobby, a vast and empty square room with two glass half walls near the entrance, and beyond that, crimson red upholstered walls, is where the intrigue began. From the ticket dispenser machine, a dull silver contraption that functioned at the ticket seller’s wrist level, elegantly spitting out a stamp sized ticket when one of two buttons on a register was pressed, to the mysterious relationship between the concessionaires and their wide variety of candied snacks and sodas, which inventory never seemed depleted, despite the fantastic numbers of them sold. Mass consumerism is the spectacle that pleads masochistically to be fetishized before deploying the sadism of addiction to insure its longevity. Our neighborhood theater began hosting midnight movies behind the national curve; Cinemas I & II were advertising “holdover screenings” of The Song Remains The Same long after Icarus had already plummeted to earth off of the famous Swan Song record label, years after the TCU theater had already blown young, local minds with Ralph Bakshi and Frank Zappa movies. The 7th St theater held the city monopoly on midnight screenings of Rocky Horror, but on the South Side of Fort Worth we sat through yet another tired Robert Plant declamation of “John Bonham Moby Dick!” Then a change occurred, beginning with Journey Through The Past. In the final half of the nineteen seventies, when I was eleven, I became friends with a solid trio—Richard, Rick, and Rodney—all of whom shared with me at the very least a passing passion for rock and roll radio. In hindsight, the apogee of this friendship climaxed almost at its beginning, when we attended a Kiss concert on the band’s 1977 Love Gun tour. The sold out Kiss show, attended by fourteen thousand fans, had made real for me the promise of community that FM radio had assured its listenership was at the mercantile heart of its programming mission. Three years later, it became clear that the trio’s interest in rock music was on the wan, when, at my urging, we ventured outside of our neighborhood to the city’s west side where the AMC Hulen 10, just two years old, brought us the Who’s The Kids Are Alright. I had wanted to impose a solidarity bonding experience upon us that would coalesce around our shared passion for music, similar to that night that Kiss had played the Tarrant County Convention Center, but live performance and film are two entirely different mediums, each with their own set of disciplines for enjoyment. The trio made it only briefly through the start of the film’s showing—the explosive footage of My Generation, from The Smothers Brothers Show—before decamping to, appropriately enough, the theater lobby’s bank of pinball machines. We made it back into the auditorium to see—all that I can remember seeing—Keith Moon being whipped in an S&M dungeon, as well as the iconic B-Stage, Shepparton Studio performance footage of Baba O’Riley filmed on May 25, 1978. After the film’s screening that afternoon the only comment I can remember being made was made by Rick, who said, dismissively, “That dude thinks he’s Robert Plant.” Immediately, silently, I contrasted both singers’ physiques; Daltry’s taut, muscular torso like a boxer’s, hairless and sun kissed. Plant’s torso, though not without definition, was softer and hirsute, Dionysian. The difference in the two men’s bodies reflected what differed in their respective performing styles; where Daltry was aggressively masculine, confrontational and sexually dynamic in the way of R&B frontmen, Plant was aloof, dreamlike and poetic, sometimes to the point of lethargy. I didn’t bother explaining any of this to the trio; it would’ve been Rick who might have had an appreciation for the distinction but the original judgment itself was so oddly myopic that to have openly challenged the veracity of its brilliant teenaged stupidity would’ve been akin to altering something fundamental about Rick himself, like attempting to correct his overbite. Years later, well into my adulthood, I finally understood how desperately I had crushed on Rick. A barrio kid with an organic assimilationist style, Rick was brown as a copper coin, with outsized facial features, large dark brown eyes and a modified Keith Richards haircut that sexualized his all-American boyhood in a bright white T-shirt, denim Levi’s jeans, and Chuck Taylor All-Star sneakers. Sports minded, vigorously healthy and physically fit, Rick elevated middle class adolescent normality to an erotic paradigm from which I was ultimately exiled at a distance wide enough to attempt to properly comprehend my attraction to it. Shortly after the Neil Young film appeared as a weekend midnight feature at Cinemas I & II, KZEW, the Dallas market FM radio station for fans of hard rock, announced a screening of Magical Mystery Tour. There wasn’t any question that I wanted to see this movie; too young to have considered myself a Beatles completist, I nevertheless obsessively occupied a remote and shadowed patch of territory in that unseen world of Beatles fandom. My imagination hadn’t yet fully metabolized my favorite Lennon compositions from this record, and the possibility of experiencing them in the context of this mysterious film attached itself to me like a pilgrim’s spiritual imperative. Without hesitation I telephoned Rick. He told me he wasn’t interested in the movie. I exhorted. Repeatedly. What I failed to grasp as I obnoxiously tried to change Rick’s mind is that a large part of what made him so attractive was his health, both mental and physical. He hadn’t reduced his field of mental acuity to one or two points of focus that threatened to consume him, and he wasn’t pretentious about his interests; when he spoke ridiculously, erroneously, confusing Roger Daltry’s and Robert Plant’s styles, he was merely speaking from an opinion that had been flawed by an indifference to nuance. He probably cared less about rock and roll than he did little league or girls. I don’t recall when final arrangements were made for our Friday night movie date but we agreed that in addition to the cost of admission, I’d pay Rick an additional five dollars which, today, I like to think of as his hustler’s fee. Capitalism temporarily broke my will for friendship but it also birthed the twentieth century hydra-headed monstrosity that eventually became the rock and roll pet of millionaires. Somewhere therein are the uncollected fragments that tell the stories of our lives.