On September 17th, 1985 3,100 fans thrilled to the sight of Ronnie James Dio slaying a mechanical dragon onstage at the Syracuse War Memorial. Now, the idea of a diminutive 40-plus-year-old man dressed like he just stepped off the set of Time Bandits dramatically plunging a sword into the throat of a fake dragon that wouldn't pass muster at a Six Flags may seem silly to you. But we're talking about a lost era here, before cable TV really got its stranglehold on American culture. My family had finally gotten a VCR just the year before, and it was roughly the size of my grandmother's steamer trunk. We still had a PONG game hooked up to a fire hazard of tangled wires that dangled like robot ganglia at the back of our walnut-paneled console TV. The concept of anything even remotely...

My hair used to be REALLY long. Cliff Burton long. Conan the Barbarian long. Born-in-the70's-hit-puberty-in-the-80's long. There was nothing ironic or unusual about this. In my day - and at a burly 38, I feel entitled to an occasional in my day - if you were a young man who knew how to rock and roll all night and party every day, this was barely a choice at all. Growing your hair was as much a conscious decision as wearing jeans or eating fast food. It wasn't a question of should I grow it out?, it was a matter of how fucking fast can I grow it? Later it became a matter of how high can it go?, but I'll save that for another installment. Some of my hairy proclivities were nothing more than an offshoot of my unconditional worship of 70's...