Getting sent to boarding school smack in the middle of the 1960s pissed me off, at first. When your world stretches a dozen neighborhood blocks in any direction, by the time you’re a high school senior, the gang you’ve been hangin’ with since grade three operates like a well-oiled machine. The status quo looks mighty fine, thank you.
But, a year from graduation, I’m yanked from my comfort zone and sent as far north as you can get in the lower 48, to a school run by monks with deep roots in French France and shallow ones in French Canada.
The first friend I make there is a music nut from Montreal, which is six or seven light years closer to what’s happening than my formerly beloved hometown. He turns me on to a British band called Them. I dig Them right off the bat. Who is/are Them? Glad you asked, because they’re really The Angry Young Them, and none other than Van the Man is at the helm, snarling, sneering, and singing the daylights out of every lyric in sight – including his own G-L-O-R-I-A, and John Lee Hooker’s Don’t Look Back!