A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex Read Online Free PDF Page B

how much he weighed, just as he answered 235 pounds, Wallass snapped the picture. When I got the picture back we were both actually in the shot, even though Steamboat’s eyes were half closed and I looked like a complete tool with bad hair and my mouth wide open like a Muppet. Wallass’s photographic ineptitude had struck again.
    Steamboat was the same height as me but a whole lot bigger. From that moment on, working out became my second biggest hobby. My biggest hobby was my band.
     

     
    I started playing bass guitar when I was fourteen years old when my cousin lent me his Paul McCartney Hofner bass. I kinda knew my way around a guitar, after taking lessons when I was nine from a guy called Brad Roberts. Coincidentally, Brad would become internationally famous as the leader of the Crash Test Dummies, best known for the song “Mmm Mmm Mmm.” I knew they had really made it big when Weird Al Yankovic parodied the track.
    When I entered junior high, I made the rock ’n’ roll decision to give up the guitar and take up the trombone instead. You could hold a gun to my head and ask me why I felt the need to be a member of the brass section but I still can’t come up with an answer. I’d like to tell you that there was a hot French horn player or that I was into Count Basie, but there wasn’t and I wasn’t. Trombone? Even being an oboe player was cooler.
    My trombone phase not withstanding, I was getting more into heavy metal, especially when I noticed that all the girls I liked were wearing shirts of bands like Ozzy Osbourne, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest. I decided if I ever wanted to actually talk to a girl, I’d better figure out who these guys were, pronto. So I bought
Blizzard of Ozz
by Ozzy and it instantly corrupted me. The Beatles were great, but Ozzy had become the new sheriff in town.
    I completely immersed myself into the metal scene and became the Clive Davis of my neighborhood by discovering Metallica, Anthrax, Raven, Saxon, Trouble, Nasty Savage, Megadeth. I’d go to the record store and look through the bins to check out album covers and the band pictures, buying the ones that I thought looked cool.
    I was such a metaller that I created major controversy with my metal friends after an appearance I made on the local video program
CitiVision.
“Chris, do you like Bryan Adams?” the host inquired.
    “Yeah, he’s okay,” I said, not caring that I really thought he sucked. I just wanted to be on TV.
    But the second I said it, I knew I’d made a horrible mistake. To the Iron Maiden crowd in my school, admitting that Bryan Adams was “okay” was akin to treason...the ultimate sin! Any true metalhead should spit on the grave of Bryan Adams and flash his family their nutsacks. As a result of my miscue, I was subjected to the worst buggings I’d endured since I was seen crying after Spock died during Star
Trek II—The Wrath of Khan.
“You cried when Spock died! You like Bryan Adams!” Becoming a Mathlete seemed to be my fate, until I quickly did something to regain my street cred. I formed a band.
    My friend since birth, Kevin Ahoff was a really good guitar player and we started jamming together. While most teenagers dabbling in guitar first learn songs like “Smoke on the Water” or “Iron Man,” the first song I ever learned on bass was a complex little ditty called “Revelation (Life or Death)” by Trouble. Then we recorded the obvious follow up to a Trouble song...the theme from
Peter Gunn
. I don’t get the connection either. But it was the first time I’d experienced the magic of playing a piece of music with another musician...and I was hooked.
    When I started high school, the first band I was in was called Primitive Means (great name), which was like a punk version of Chicago; ten guys in the band with three or four guitarists and anybody who came over could join in. We’d write riffs and make up lyrics on the spot. Since nobody else wanted to sing, I decided to pull double duty. Warren