One of my best friends, a diehard baseball fan, once called hockey the “AC/DC of the sporting world.” As a life-long AC/DC fan, I accepted it as the compliment it is. She was helping me out with my hockey problem by attending the occasional game with me.
“If you can’t beat ‘em, beat ‘em,” she stood up and screamed as a fight broke out during a bruising Caps loss. At another, we made the jumbotron because she was singing along to “The Hockey Song.” She’s even better at baseball games, her home turf. Never leave a game early. You will be rightfully and loudly scorned if she sees you slinking by.
When I think of her, I think about baseball, and I was reminded of both one day, when on my way to the rink, my shuffling phone popped out my walk-up song. My theoretical one, of course, given I had not held a bat in years, and hockey really has no analogue. Clever DJs can make musical commentary before face-offs, but that is not the same. You choose your walk-up song, not the DJ.
And you must choose wisely. I could go into a long description of how certain aspects of my life have had frightening parallels to the lives of the music nerds in High Fidelity, but I will refrain for the moment. In the arguments/discussions that preceded my ultimate choice, which I now heard blasting from the radio and which I had completely forgotten about, I had shortened my potential list to five songs and three artists.
- Ted Leo, “Me and Mia” and “2nd Ave. 11 a.m”
- PJ Harvey, “Long Snake Moan” and “50-Foot Queenie”
- Pixies (cover of the Jesus and Mary Chain song), “Head On”
My choices had much to recommend them in my mind, and several of the songs could be said to have changed my life. Leo’s album Hearts of Oak and Harvey’s Rid of Me cover all sides of a broken heart, whatever the loss cause. The Leo songs shimmer as they urge the listener onward against challenges interior and exterior. The Harvey hymns brim with swagger and intensity, two necessary ingredients for a song brandishing an ability to crush the opposition.
But I entertained a different kind of crush. For me, hockey’s intensity went beyond the braggadocio, its spark was bigger and scarier, its flash essentially what happens when you fall in love:
“As soon as I get my head around you/I come around catching sparks off you/I get an electric charge from you/This secondhand living it just won’t do.”
If I were honest, that was what was happening to me. It wasn’t with a person and it wasn’t even going all that well, but it was falling in love, to a soundtrack of great big chiming guitars and drum rolls that almost don’t stop, amid the ebb and flow of not knowing what the heck to do or why, an energy that just can’t settle, “something going on inside, makes you want to feel, makes you want to try, makes you want to blow the stars from the sky.”
I said, yeah, yeah, yeah.