Meet the Geeks

During the year 1983 something was happening. This guitar player named Eddie Van Halen had been making headlines all over the world with his band Van Halen. However, in our neck of the woods, stuck with AM radio, we’d never heard of Van Halen. Glen Campbell, Anne Murray, and Gordon Lightfoot were all the radio would give us. When Van Halen’s 1984 came out, it revolutionized the music industry. Seriously. In our neck of the woods, the album broke open what we could listen to the radio. I mean Kiss never got radio play. But Van Halen was getting a lot of radio airplay. And a lot of other bands were getting airplay too. All of a sudden, hard rock was now being made available to the masses. Music with searing guitars, monster drums, pounding bass, and wailing vocals was now on the radio and I couldn’t be happier. Kiss had been my only island amidst all that AOR (Adult Oriented Rock) that saturated the airwaves. Now I could take my pick. It was my brother who glomed on Van Hal...

Sunday morning at #Keycon35 and I just pulled myself out of bed and  came down to the fifteenth floor to my preferred place to sit and write. Last nights panel, a reunion of Alumni of The Evil Within, went off much better than I could have expected. Despite a couple of slight mis-steps we managed to pull off a podcast, to be edited later once we find out if the audio is usable, and showed part of the movie. We had several people show up, Matt Vosper, Clayton Stewart, Edgar Governo, Caryn Suderman, Chris Reid, and Jason Kelsch, alum’s that I did not expect to see. It was frankly amazing. We started the panel running through photos from the production and kicking off discussion about the panel. The photos are from Clayton’s personal stash including several of children that are adults now. I honestly thought that Caryn might tear up when we had pictures of her now 17 year old son from when he was two and asking for Blues Clues to be painted on his face. For me the highlight th...