My Gullible Ear Blog Post, on the Five and the Late, Great Bill von Hagen

Time to redirect you, once again, to another blog for which I have the courtesy of writing a piece once a month. Will Simmons edits  The Gullible Ear, a weekly blog in which various friends sound off on one particular song per entry. Sometimes liberties are taken by some writers and more than one song will come into play, but that's the idea. 

Lately I've been thinking back on my life as a high school freshman, the feeling coming in large part because my son is that exact same age. With each passing year, I find myself looking back on where I was when I was his age. At this point in the school year, I was coping with the loss of my great aunt, barely six months after losing her sister. Both of them were like surrogate maternal grandmothers to me, since my mom's mom had passed a year before I was born. The aunts' two room apartment, cramped as it may have been, nevertheless provided a refuge from the homefront, as well as cold cans of pop and some sort of junkfood. 

Now they were gone, which was really driven home by the one day over Christmas break when I was enlisted to help clean out their apartment. My 14-year old brain couldn't put words to the way I was feeling, but being in that apartment without either of those ladies there just seemed weird. The one amusing part of that task came when my mom found the envelopes of money that my aunt's had stashed under the refrigerator and dresser. It's funny looking back on it. But at that time, I was blasé about it, having known all along that it was there.

I've written about this time period before on this blog, and how punk rock was becoming a big part of my life. But my recent Gullible Ear entry deals with the first record by the local band the Five, which was a game changer both musically and socially. If that qualification sounds odd, just go to the link and read it.

But before you leave this page, I have to mention the second part of the post. A few days before I started writing about the Five, I heard that Pittsburgh had lost one of the driving forces of the first wave of local punk rock - Bill "Bill Bored" von Hagen. Not only that, he was a great guy too, so I had to pay my respects to him. We're losing to many folks too young. Bill was 66 and that's too damn young. 

Here's to those who have broken ground and made the city safe for next batch of musicians.

(Note: This post did not originally have the link to the Gullible Ear. That oversight has been corrected.)