Chris Preston and New Aquarius Online

My earliest memory in rock and roll is when I was five years old. It’s 1976, and I’ve received some money for some occasion, some holiday or a birthday. It’s the hefty sum of about ten dollars total. Over the last months, some kids in the neighborhood have been playing an 8-track of an album by a band called Kiss. The album is called Destroyer.

These kids told me all about this band and how they wore makeup and spit blood and breathed fire. The guitar player (who I’d find out later wasn’t the guitar player at all), Gene Simmons, was the devil. Another guitar player was from outer space. He was called Ace. The drummer, who looked like a cat, had had his life saved by a tiger and took on the persona as a tribute. There was another guy, named Paul, with a star on his eye, but that’s about all they knew about him. All of this folklore, which was the highest form of misinformation, had lit something in me when I heard the tape they played and I was completely transfixed. Who were these people? They were the scariest/most exciting thing. They named their band for their devotion to the devil. KISS stood for Kids In Satan’s Service. (I’d later find out that this was also bullshit.)

I beg my parents to let me buy this record. I’m obsessed with it. The songs were in my head all the time, especially "Shout It Out Loud."

“Could we go to the record store? Kiss. They breathe fire and have a guy from outer space and another guy who dresses like a cat because he was saved by a tiger in the forest.”

My mother has no idea about Kiss. She tells me that we’re going to Two Guys this morning and I could look at the records there. I’m so excited that I go back to my room and put on my new orange sneakers and wait. After an interminable delay, we pile into my father’s ‘66 Buick Special and make our way over to Two Guys in East Hanover. I don’t know where the store is, but I’ve been there. My older brother by eighteen months, Dan, has some money too, but he wants to spend it on something sports-related. Maybe a new football or something. Whatever.

As soon as the four of us get into Two Guys, I start asking if I can go to look at the records.

“Can I go to look at the records? C’mon, it’s right there. See, it’s right there!”

Having been unrelenting in my pursuit to get right to my purpose, my dad agrees. My mother heads elsewhere with my brother, but I don’t care. The record department is a special white platform near the center of the store that’s about a foot higher than the regular floor. Music is blasting out of the speakers that rest atop the record department racks and I can hear the music as I approach. It’s electric guitars, but it’s not Kiss. Record racks form walls around the perimeter of the platform and they tower high over my head. In the center of one of the walls is an opening with a single step in front of it. My dad and I step up.

We step onto the gray tiled floor and I see posters mounted on cardboard, hanging from the ceiling from what looks like fishing line tacked into the white porous ceiling tiles. The posters turn slowly and randomly, perhaps shifted by an oscillating fan in another department on the main floor. On one of them is a close-up image of a girlish looking boy with long blond curly hair, wearing a shiny blue satin shirt.

I remind my dad of the record I’m looking for. I’m not tall enough to browse any more than the first row of the racks that surround us. He locates the record and hands it to me. My heart jumps and I stare at the colorful cover grinning wildly at the comic book style painting by Ken Kelly. It features a fiery Kiss logo and the word DESTROYER beneath it. The cover depicts the four mysterious members of the group in full battle regalia and face paint standing on the rubble of a steaming and smoking wasteland. Some of them have their hands clenched in fists either in front of them or over their heads like victorious mythical warlords. Ace, the one from outer space, hides his thumb behind the back of his hand, extending four fingers the way I did when I told someone how old I was last year. I can’t contain the thrill that I’m finally going to have a Kiss record, the one I’ve been hearing on 8-track up the street and in my head every day for what seems like an eternity.

"Is that the one?" my father asks.

I nod, not looking up and turn the record over to look at the back cover, which is more wasteland and some writing.

"OK, let’s go find your mother."

I hold the record tightly and try to walk and stare at the cover at the same time. When we meet up with my mother and brother, I am more relaxed because the mission of acquiring my record is nearly accomplished. I care about nothing except getting home to play it. Just then, a siren wails outside and I hear it over the music in the record department. Near the register lines, I see through the glass out into the parking lot.

A fire truck! Wow! A real fire truck going to a fire! I can’t see!

I run past the registers and away from my parents over to the window near the automatic Exit door. The lights atop the truck outside spin and hurl red beams of light onto the wall inside Two Guys.

"Hey kid!"

"Chris!"

I reach the window and stand on my toes, trying to glimpse the truck or a fire or fireman.

 I can’t see anything. I still hear the sirens! Where’d they go?

I lean my forehead on the glass, which begins at about eye level for me. If this window would open, I could look down further.

Maybe they’re next door!

My dad comes up behind me and touches my shoulder.

"You can’t go past the register with that until we pay for it."

I snap out of the place I’m in and see in my dad’s face that he isn’t necessarily angry. He turns me around and I look down and see the record still clutched in my hands. Oh yeah, my record! I look up to see a girl in a brown and tan smock with a Two Guys logo near the lapel, glaring at me from the register. My mother is standing on the line with my brother and looking about nervously. I’m embarrassed because I’ve completely forgotten myself. Now I feel like everyone in Two Guys is staring at me. I hear nothing. Though I’m flushed with the humiliation of the moment, I manage to say aloud to my dad, and coolly and indirectly to anyone from Two Guys who’s mad at me, that I wasn’t going to steal anything, I just wanted to see the fire truck.

~

Here’s a reproduction of the Destroyer album cover, autographed by Ken Kelly. It’s hanging in my studio. When I look at it, I often think of the day I bought my first copy of  the album. My piano tuner saw it one day. He said, “Hey cool! Which guy signed it?” I told him that it was actually signed by the artist. “Wow! Even better!” he said.