Ode to our 16 year old selves

I just lost myself on youtube. Lost my 16 year old self. My favorite band in 1986 was Lone Justice ... and not many kids in Marin County, where I grew up, had ever heard from them. Now that I think about it, I have no idea how I first heard them, but I do remember a time when I was in the juniors department of Macy's at our mall and they had just installed TV monitors playing music videos. I remember one video of a band with a lead singer with a strong, earnest and pretty face ... she had pale skin and curly hair like me ... wore matte ruby lips and attacked the microphone like James Brown. She was aggressive and competent and scarily free and I was mesmerized. Maybe that was the first time I saw Maria McKee. I bought their first album, and they had this really weird, alt (before there was an "alt") country, cowpunk sound that my step-brother used to make fun of me for. And truly, I can't blame him. At that exact time, most kids were listening to Def Leppard and Van Halen and the most alternative it got, was The Alarm ("68 guns will never die ... 68 guns,the battle cry ...")

Maria sang about redemption, sad eyes, springs in the mattress and Bourbon. She was from Los Angeles ... and yet, salvation, cold dinners sitting on the stove and tv's with antennae were woven into her lyrics. She glorified a yellow mobile home life with beauty, lipstick and ... dare I say ... class? I remember when I saw that Macy's video, I thought she was so passionate, she must be on drugs. She scared me, so I could definingly compartmentalize her into a young, So-Cal girl in a man's world, who spouted and thrashed at the mic.

Lone Justice broke up after just 2 albums. I played the song "Shelter" for my 70-something year old English grandmother when I was 16. Although she was impressed by the sophisticated melody for an American teen, she found the chorus to be quite repetitive. When I was 19, Maria released her first solo album. I had rented a room in a Victorian in Noe Valley in San Francisco and would listen to it sitting on the hardwood floor of my room ... crying in tune to her lyrics.

Maria has been my newspaper ... the proverbial soundtrack to my life. I understand that now, she's married, in her 40's and never had children. She still tours ... mostly in Ireland, where she is profoundly popular .... but showings near the west coast are incredibly rare. To this day, her voice warms me from the inside out, throws me into my dreamland, and gives me goosebumps. I am the 9 year old singing into my hand ... her lips are my lips and somehow she is my sister.